Instead, born in 1980 to careless parents in rural Pennsylvania, he ran wild, unattended and unmedicated.
The reality: Given that it's the second time that Kevin's careless parents have allowed him to fend for himself at a young age, it's likely that social services would have a word.
After a dramatic yet understandable wish to be left alone for the holidays comes true, when his careless parents accidentally leave him behind for Christmas, he luxuriates in his freedom.
He often gives his characters absent or cruelly careless parents; the monstrously unmaternal mother of Michel and Bruno, in "The Elementary Particles," who casts off her children and keeps a sexual open house for drive-by hippies, can be seen as a vengeful portrait of Houellebecq's own mother, whose neglect of him he has never forgiven.
Believing that the Shelleys were careless parents who were responsible for the deaths of their children and concerned that the children were not receiving proper religious training, he consistently refused to let Claire see their daughter.
Like an adolescent who experienced a relatively happy childhood and then lived through the divorce of her careless parents, physical and psychological abuse, poverty and bullying by those she is put in care of, with little prospect of hope, Greece's self-destructiveness is reaching a critical point.
Oates has long traded in stereotypes (archetypes, she has said), but here she opts for caricature, particularly in her portrait of the monstrously selfish, careless Rampike parents.
And those poor people in Iraq live with each day, afraid to leave their home, afraid to speak at their own dinner table, frightened for their children that might be tortured in order to punish the parent's careless moment.
AUDIO: Listen now "Some of our parents are careless," she says.
Your parents' bedroom is the most likely candidate, so start in the closet and under the bed (some parents are careless like this).
