How Home Alone started a debate about rebellious children

This holiday season marks the 25th anniversary of the release of the Christmas movie Home Alone. The film fascinated a generation of latchkey children and their baby boomer parents with its portrayal of eight-year-old Kevin McCallister, who not only survives while his family is out of the country but anchors them when they forget the real meaning of Christmas. It spent four weeks at no. 1 in box office sales and grossed nearly $300 million in the United States. It also sparked a debate over the authority of parents.

In a recent Atlantic piece, “How Home Alone Ruined John Hughes,” the writer argued that in the 1980s, John Hughes produced “definitive” films like The Breakfast Club and Ferris Bueller's Day Off about that generation’s youth, but then sold out for popularity in the 1990s beginning with Home Alone. 

Hughes was hardly a director creating arthouse films who then suddenly began making children’s movies to get famous, but there was a perceptible shift in Hughes’s thinking about children and family in the latter half of his career. The McCallister children dressed and acted differently than the rebellious and sexually promiscuous teens that filled most of Hughes’ earlier movies. Far from being robotic or dismissively obedient, they appear to possess agency—possibly because they are less fretful about the future.