Science fiction often focuses on the future with new worlds, new threats, and the people who rise to meet them. It rarely shows how those people were shaped before the action begins. Behind every chosen one, every rebel, and every survivor is the person who raised them. Someone taught them to think, to feel, and to hold on when the world changed. Raising a child in a strange or dangerous world is not just background; in many stories, it is the reason someone survives. When families are split, when planets fall, and when systems collapse, the role of a caregiver becomes central. Not every parent is perfect, and not every decision is correct, but their effort to love and guide is often the most human part of the story. This essay examines how science fiction explores parenting, not just biologically, but also emotionally and ethically. From humans raising clones to machines caring for children, these stories ask hard questions. What does it mean to protect someone? How do we raise a child who is not like us? How do we hold on to love when the world starts falling apart?
Science fiction frequently envisages machines bringing children up. We have androids teaching, protecting, and feeding. They obey the law, have a schedule, and do not hesitate about their duties. However, parenting is not only a list of things to do. It has to do with establishing safety, confidence, and emotional attachment, which are things that cannot be programmed. They have to be constructed over time, pain, and love. In the movie I Am Mother, a child is brought up by a robot in a closed-up bunker. The machine gives shelter, food, and education. Everything appears to be alright on the surface. But the bond is shallow. The robot is logical and not emotional when fear is displayed or trust is tested. The lack of emotional vulnerability creates a hole that the child would never be able to cross. Robotic caregivers fail in this aspect. They do not make mistakes. They do not run away, repent, and make a second attempt. They are accurate yet insensitive. Therefore, their parenting does not exemplify how to overcome failure or remain gentle in the rough world. Unless children see their caregivers make mistakes and try again, they may struggle to know what to do when things go wrong. The more profound question these stories pose is: can love exist without emotion, choice or growth? Parenting is not only about responsibility. It has to entail total attendance—all the fear and all the mess and education that comes with it. The remaining part of this essay shifts to human parenting, where love and care are influenced by work, grief, and the decision to remain.
Much science fiction introduces us to the child when it is already changed. One of them is fleeing to safety. A teenager is trying to realise their powers, a mute witness to reconstruction. But not one of them got there by himself. Somebody was obliged to show them how to speak, how to listen, how to continue going, when everything became upside down in the world. In The Last of Us, Joel not only protects Ellie. He raises her. He reads her reactions. He sets limits. He appears even when the world they live in is falling apart. His love isn't loud. It manifests itself in practice: guarding, creating silent space to grieve, taking the burden off her hands. In Interstellar, Cooper travels across galaxies, but what defines him is not exploration, it is the bond with Murph that persists across time. He is the one who teaches Murph to doubt, to see, and to believe in herself. His fatherhood is an imprint that cuts across time and space. The thread between them holds even though the distance between them is in light-years. These are moments that are usually in the wings, yet they provide the foundation for the tale. In science fiction, parenting does not necessarily involve big gestures. It is often how small ones go: being calm, telling the truth and making the hard choice because a small person is observing. These decisions not only determine the child, but also the future.
Beneath the struggle, we often witness quiet moments of parenting. A shared story. A warm meal. A word of comfort. These acts carry meaning that outlasts the chaos. In The Road, a father and son navigate a post-apocalyptic world. There is no comfort, but there is love. The father doesn’t just keep his child alive. He teaches him how to stay kind in a world that has forgotten how. These scenes matter because they show care when it is hardest. When food is gone, when safety is a memory, the parent still finds a way to hold on to something gentle. A meal is shared. A bedtime story is told. These are not just habits. They are quiet acts of resistance. Science fiction amplifies the danger. It gives us burning skies and empty cities. But the emotional core stays real. Parenting in these stories is a choice to keep believing. It is a decision to pass on hope, even when nothing is specific. That is not just survival. It is the beginning of something better.In A Quiet Place, the parents build systems to protect their children in silence, teaching them not only how to avoid death, but how to live without losing warmth. A bedtime routine, a shared look, or a hand held in fear becomes a kind of defiance. These are not just habits of routine. They are acts of resistance. When the world strips everything else away, parenting becomes the one act that preserves belief in a future. Finally, these stories remind us: survival alone is not enough. What we pass on must still carry care.
Then some creators become parents whether they intended to or not. In Blade Runner 2049, the act of creation brings questions about duty and care. In Frankenstein, Victor builds a being and then abandons it. In these instances, the child is not (only) shaped by nature. It is shaped by what happens after, by whether someone stays. Fiction gives us children built from code, grown in labs, or rescued from other worlds. Again and again, the same truth surfaces. What makes a parent is not biology. It is presence. The bond grows in the ordinary acts of sharing space, teaching, listening, and choosing to stay when things get hard. This becomes even clearer when the parent and child have nothing in common, no shared genes, culture, or language. Still, they build something. And in doing so, the story invites us to reexamine our own notions of what constitutes a family. What makes someone a parent is not how the child arrived. It is what happens next.
Science fiction often gives us alien infants, clones, or artificial beings. In Foster, the child does not speak or behave in ways the human father understands. In Splice, the creature grows fast and changes in ways the parents didn’t expect. These stories make parenting more complicated by removing all familiarity. But the response stays the same. The caregiver watches, listens, and tries again. Love becomes an act of translation. The connection comes not from matching, but from effort. That effort often shows more care than words could. This mirrors real parenting, too. Some children are neurodivergent. Some are adopted. Some grow up with their own language and way of seeing the world. The parent might not always understand, but they still choose to stay. They love without needing everything to make sense. Science fiction can make these differences more visible. It shows what happens when all the usual cues are gone. And still, it tells us that care can grow in unexpected places. That parenting, even without shared ground, can still be significant.
The chosen families are able to form a strong bond even without the unity of blood. This is brought about by small, frequent moves that make them stand by one another, rescue one another, and remain loyal. This kind of behavior develops good relationships. Instead of discrediting the concept of family, they reveal how strong love can be constructed in small steps with the help of real work. Love does not just come automatically, but is created. In the world of uncertainty, making a decision to become a parent turns into a defiant act, against the fear, against loss, one moment at a time. It is not just about preparing for the future but also about tending to the past. Care continues across separation, silence, and uncertainty. A parent may no longer live in the same house, the same world, or even the same lifetime as their child. Still, the desire to remain present, to be remembered, does not fade.
In Foster, the caregiver depends on quiet routines and fading memories. These gestures are small and sometimes unsure, but they are ways to stay close while the child begins to change. In Interstellar, Cooper sends messages across time, unsure if his daughter will ever hear them. The words are imperfect, but they hold a father’s hope that love might survive delay. The Midnight Gospel centers on a father and daughter talking through memory, death, and what was never said aloud. Their conversations do not follow lessons. They search for meaning in what remains. The Midnight Skyadds another layer. A dying scientist sends a signal to a ship of survivors, unaware that one of them is his daughter. He is not speaking to her directly, but he records what he can. The message becomes a final act of care—one not built for response, but for presence. These stories remind us that parenting often moves through distance. Love does not always arrive on time. It travels through silence, through memory, and sometimes, through the space left behind.
Some science fiction explores parenting in worlds where time no longer flows in a straight line. In WandaVision, Wanda creates and re-creates a home, looping through reality to sustain her children within a grief-constructed timeline. Even when aware that this world may collapse, she continues parenting as an act of love and resistance. In these stories, parenting is not always tied to presence. A parent may send a message, leave a recording, or offer a gift to a child they may never see again. Even in rupture, care continues. The rhythm may be strange, but the task remains the same: to guide, protect, and love as best as one can. These actions may seem fragmented, but they still carry the essence of care. The role of a parent remains to guide, protect, and nurture—even when time itself is unstable.
Science fiction often portrays parenting that unfolds at a distance. The separation may be physical, emotional, or even temporal. In these stories, caregiving does not always happen in the same room or the same lifetime. Instead, it happens through systems, recordings, or technologies that extend care across time. In After Yang, a family purchases an android to help their adopted daughter connect with her cultural roots. When Yang shuts down, the parents are forced to confront how little they had truly engaged with their child’s identity. In accessing Yang’s memory bank—full of gentle observations and emotional fragments—they discover not just Yang’s quiet care, but the gaps in their own. It is through this distance that they begin to reconnect, realizing that parenting often means paying attention in ways we didn’t before.
These are the questions that become central to these stories: can love be important when time is displaced or disordered? They reveal to us the extent of care, which can be extended over space, over time, over memory. By so doing, science fiction does not deny the concept of care, but takes it out of its comfort zone. It examines how love changes in the situation where the conventional conditions of intimacy, regularity, and commonality are not guaranteed any longer. Parenting is not simply being at the same place and time. It is also having to do away with values and support—emotional instruments that are inherited by way of memory, design, or premeditation. Science fiction imagines life on a new planet, or a remote colony. In these stories, parents sometimes rear children for worlds that they themselves may never see. It turns into a process of preparing the generation to come for a future that will be unfamiliar, inaccessible, or even impossible.
This form of parenting is one of what is left behind. Parents give their tools, ideas and values, with the understanding that they will never see the result. They assist in the development of a child's sense of home and self. The lessons remain powerful even in cases where the location is unfamiliar. That care becomes something the child can carry into the future, shaping how they live long after the parent is gone. Through these stories, it is evident that parenting may not produce instant outcomes. It can even be planting the seeds, which, a long time after the parent is dead, are then brought to fruition. It makes the home that they create a part of the child's base, although the parent might never reside on the same land. The struggle is worthwhile, well into the future.
In many science fiction stories, parents are not heroes. They are often wounded, grieving, or simply tired. Some have lost their homes in war. Others have watched entire worlds fall. But despite the damage, they continue to care. Parenting does not pause in crisis. It adapts. These parents may not offer perfect wisdom or endless comfort. Sometimes, they have no words at all. But they show up. Their presence alone becomes a lesson. A quiet meal shared in silence. A story told before sleep. A broken lullaby hummed out of habit. Through small acts, the child learns that care continues even when the world does not. One striking example comes from Station Eleven, where a former actor raises a child in the wake of a pandemic that has erased much of human civilization. He offers little stability and no clear answers. But he gives what he can: kindness, stories, and a sense of memory. The child learns to survive not through strict rules, but through watching how care looks when resources are gone and grief is constant. Beyond survival, legacy also takes shape. In The Last of Us, Joel carries the weight of past loss while trying to protect Ellie from repeating it. His parenting is rough and often flawed, but rooted in a desire to leave her with more than he had, more safety, more choice, and maybe even more hope. These stories show that parenting in collapse is rarely about perfection. It is about trying. It is about deciding what parts of ourselves to pass on, and which ones to quietly let die. That choice of what to carry forward shapes the future as much as any resistance or invention ever could.
Finally, there are stories in science fiction that speculate on a future in which governments or systems attempt to control the upbringing of children. The question these stories raise is what would become of parenting when it is substituted with surveillance, rules and programs. This can be in the name of safety or order. However, something so human is destroyed in the process. The system may provide education, food, and even shelter. But it cannot bring comfort, warmth, and love. A camera may observe a child, but not embrace him. It is possible to regulate through a rule, but not to educate someone to be kind. In Equilibrium, for example, emotional expression is forbidden. Parents who show affection risk being arrested or worse. Children are trained to report noncompliance—even when it comes from their own family. One misstep, one tear, one moment of connection could break the illusion of control. And so, love must hide. It becomes coded in glances, small rituals, or shared silences that say more than words. Other stories, like 1984, present even deeper erosion. Winston’s fear of the telescreen mirrors what a parent might feel when teaching a child how to lie to survive. The home becomes another battlefield, where trust must be negotiated moment by moment. In such environments, children may grow up never seeing love clearly. They learn to mimic obedience, not warmth. They learn survival, not safety. But parenting is messy. It entails love, errors, and intimacy. These cannot be forced. They cannot be programmed. Science fiction warns us that love cannot be ordered. It must grow from intimacy, not instruction.
In these imagined futures, fear becomes the loudest voice in the room. Parents stop telling bedtime stories and start offering survival tips. Sometimes, even silence is not safe. The question these stories ask is chilling: can love survive when it cannot be expressed? Yet even in these spaces, some characters try. A small smile. A lullaby whispered under a vent. A carefully chosen word in a bedtime story. These gestures, though fragile, suggest that love still tries to move. It adapts, even if it has to do so in the shadows. These stories remind us that the act of parenting is not just emotional. It is political. In places where control is total, loving a child becomes an act of quiet rebellion.
It is the relationship between people that is at the core of many science fiction stories, not the fight or the great discovery. Bringing up a child is not just parenting. It is a decision to care, despite the fact that the world is in a state of turmoil. Such a decision will be the initial move towards restoring hope. The experience of parenting determines the future world. During difficult moments, a parent is trusted, comforting, and meaningful. Such minor acts do not remain small. They are dispersed and reach out to others. They are not just those between two people. They are foundations of something bigger and more permanent. When science fiction invents new worlds, it also presents the question of how we might bring up someone in new worlds. These tales teach us that love, care and patience are still important. They can be important even in times when all other things are unfamiliar. The future may not be as good as power or machines. It may begin with love.
Koneru Hanmantharao from India writes about culture, imagination, and how stories reflect everyday choices. Focusing on speculative fiction, Koneru explores themes like care, identity, and change. This is my first essay for Speculative Insight.