#because he had the strongest ties to his birth family
okay but in all seriousness i dothink it’s interesting to break down the like. distortion and exaggeration of various elements of tim’s origin story, and track the probable course of that over time
like–tim is thirteen when he’s introduced, and imo leaving a thirteen year old at home alone for a week or two while you take a work trip isn’t thategregious, if you make the appropriate arrangements; it’s not exactly model parenting, especially if you do it as often as tim’s parents seem to, but the neglect is more in the accumulation of that time, and the way they seem to prioritize everything exceptbeing around and present for their son. (& tim is in boarding school during this period, so it’s only really during breaks that he’s potentially unsupervised.)
but the further you start extrapolating that into the past … like, leaving a nine or ten year old alone for multiple days? significantlyweirder. like, that’s the difference between “ehhhhh questionable decision” and “holy shit how has someone not called cps yet”.and if he’s being left alone at sixforany length of time that’s pretty unambiguously illegal.
this isalsoone of those things where the mores have changed significantly in the ~30 years since tim was introduced. like when i was looking stuff up for this post i kept running into suggestions that it might, if you were very sure of their maturity, be okay to leave your 16-17 year old alone at home for as many as two consecutive nights, and like … maybe this is a weird mommy blog thing and not a generational thing but when i was a teenager (some … 12-15 years ago?? gosh) i cannot actually imagine anyone suggesting that a 16 year old kid could not be trusted at home alone for any reason other than “they will definitely throw a party.” so like, something that when it was written was probably intended to be “this is iffy but well within the range of what normal parents try to get away with” is in retrospect made to look like “?!?!?!”
and that same principle applies to a lot of things about tim’s parents’ childrearing, tbh–that tim doesn’t know where his parents are at any given point in time, and doesn’t seem to be in regular contact with them when they’re away (canon) is … sad, but significantly more understandable in 1989, when international long-distance calling is complicated and expensive, than in 2015, when smartphones are commonplace and every mcdonalds in the world offers free wifi. (also way more understandable pre-online shopping and package-tracking: sending a birthday postcard/package that arrives late.) and that drift, in turn, creates the gap between “superficially loving but distracted” (probably, more or less, what the writers were going for) and “willfully indifferent” (how tim’s parents are overwhelmingly portrayed in fanon).
