Where have all the babies gone?
I'm annoyed at the lack of parents in many canons, expecially exotic ones. Specifically, I'm annoyed at the lack of parents of babies and toddlers--we have occasional parents of as young as preteens, but usually teenagers (Molly & Arthur Weasley, Dr. Beverly Crusher, Captain Benjamin Sisko). The O'Briens on DS9 are the only parents of young children I can think of in RL canon with a fan following, and the children were used as a Marriage Troubles Plot Device. (RL canon, as contrasted with The Simpsons or Family Guy, or any of the zillion of kid-focused cartoon shows.) But the O'Briens were very much "couple on a [quasi-]military base"... one of the arguments was that this was not how either of them thought children should be raised.

It makes for an interesting (and annoying) effect when I try to imagine more details about these shows.

Trekkiverse: So, I start to think, if I were a yeoman on the Enterprise (whatever edition), and I fell in love with a nice sexy technician from Engineering, and we decided to emigrate to Pontificus IV, what kind of life might we have? Say we want to raise a family who could be crew on the next wave of Enterprises, two or three decades from now. Well, we're officers from a quasi-military organization, although I suppose we're not career Starfleet; we did our 2-5 years each after our Federation-supplied college education, picked a planet with an agreeable atmosphere and good solid Federation tech (not one of those recent colony worlds with all the problems), and we get jobs. Maybe I get a job as a library data manager. Maybe he gets a job rewiring the city's transit lines. We decide it's time to have a baby...

Then what? Do I stop taking my monthly hormone supplement, or do I visit my med-techie of choice to have my contraceptive implant removed? Or does he get an injection that re-starts his active sperm development? Or do we, for the first time, have sex skin-to-skin instead of through a holodeck illusion?

Erm. Okay, one way or the other, I get pregnant. We have a baby. Then...
I quit my job? I hire a nursemaid? He quits his job? We switch to a job schedule that puts us working opposite shifts? We have a 15 months of parenting leave, like all Federation employees? I bring my baby to work and breastfeed between typing entries in the database? I have a nifty superpump that fits discreetly under my shirt and extracts breastmilk to a refrigerated set of bottles, which we'll feed the baby when I get home? Or they've perfected formula (right down to the stem cells and whoever's holding the baby gets a bottle from the nearest replicator? We use cloth diapers? Paper diapers? Replicated diapers that get recycled right down to their atoms?

A few short months later (my, how time flies when you don't have to actually removed the strained peas from their hair) Baby is starting to move around on zir own, and maybe walk. Baby gets: a sandbox? A swimming pool? A scooter full of blinkie lights that sets off a beeper on my belt when zie falls down? A group of "friends" at the park? (Anyone who thinks 1-yr-old babies has "friends" has delusions. They do have playmates sometimes.) A tutor who begins to teach zir how to read Federation Prime Language? A pack of braintapes and a cyberhelmet?

Fast-forward a few more years; Trekling is ready for school. Zie is taught... to read one language? To read and speak Federation, Vulcan, Bajoran, and a smattering of Klingon? To use a tricorder? To use Ferengi counting beads (but not by the teachers; older kids teach these criminal skills)? The history of Earth? The history of Pontificus IV, and the colonization thereof? The history of the war against the Borg, and how noble Starfleet defeated them? The history of wormhole exploration?

I could continue. There's a great lack of even vague information; I can't put together even a general idea of how Trekkish children are raised.

But there are other canons, right?

Potterverse: Half-muggles have a long and complex history in the Potterverse. Lots of heroes. Lots of villains. Not sure if there's anyone in-between; I don't remember any minor characters who have one muggle parent. But setting that aside... okay, we have a baby. A witchlet or wizling. Our little wibabe gets the best that money can buy or magic can provide, right? A stroller with a non-tipping charm. A mobile of animated pixies. Vaccination shots? Do wizards vaccinate their children? If not, how do they keep them hidden? (Are shots required in the UK?)

If we were muggles, at the age of 4-6, the child would attend school. But Rowling says most wizard kids are homeschooled or home tutored. So... does my darling wibrat go off to public school and terrify the muggles by talking about brooms and wands? Does zie stay home while I learn to keep a garden, and my husband has a job making dragonhide boots at Diagon Alley? (Can I even go to Diagon Alley?) Does my child get a wand as soon as zie is old enough to wave one around, or is that a pre-puberty rite of passage? Can I use some magic items, and if not, can we afford a witchly nanny/assistant, who can calmly levitate my child down from the top of the bookshelf zie's teleported to? Do wibabies terrify their parents with knife-and-fire activities, and how much worse are those than muggle babies' adventures? Are there tiny fairies that are enlisted in the care of wichildren? Those tutors... is it possible I could get a job as one? Can I floo to people's homes, and teach the basics of literacy and mathematics to kids who are eventually going to be able zap their enemies to jelly?

The Potterverse, while it has a lot of focus on the activities of teen children, manages to neatly avoid any consideration of how children younger than about 8 are treated, how they learn, how their families are structured.

Both of those universes are focused on A Series Of Adventures. Perhaps it's reasonable that they offer no details about baby-and-childhood. (We will set aside the issue that the hints we're given about family life often don't seem to make sense, given the tech/magic involved. That's a different essay.)

I can skip over modern-day fandoms like SPN, Buffy, and Due South: I know how children are raised in those worlds. While I deplore the lack of parents shown in them (like we're some kind of hobbyist, roughly equivalent to pizza delivery guys--everyone knows someone who was or is one, but you don't see 'em every day), I at least know how to connect my notions of parenting to their worlds. But the truly exotic worlds, like "400 years from now on another planet" or "world of dragons, unicorns and wizards" should surely have different parenting styles, different ways of raising kids from what I see at the supermarket, different "Make Your Baby Happy/Smart/Calm" products than what I can buy at Target.

On the one hand, it's annoying that there just aren't enough details to even come up with "this is probably roughly what it's like, plus some individual variants." On the other, it's convenient that it's open enough to allow for all sorts of theories to be explored in fanfic... uterine replicators on Federation planets so women don't have to endure the hassle of pregnancy and labor, contraception spells for witches and house elf nannies for baby wizlets. Or maybe clone vats for having identical triplets that are identical to a parent, or babysleep pods growing on giant beanstalks.

We get to decide. We get to explore those ideas any way that strikes our fancy. Maybe some other time I'll grumble about the lack of baby-related fic, and what that implies about our various fandoms. Right now, I'm grumbling about canon and trying to perceive the gaps as fannish opportunities.