Adults Are Useless

""Is every adult in this show a moron?!""

- Timmy Turner, commenting on a parody of The Simpsons.

In some shows that revolve around teenagers, preteens, or younger children, adults can't do anything right -- if they appear on-screen at all. Teachers tend to be annoying sticks-in-the-mud who do nothing but spoil people's fun. Parents are clueless, and either over- or underprotective. And any other designated authority figures the kid might come across? Forget it.

Usually, this is just plot necessity (especially on comedy shows). After all, a High School Hustler could hardly get anything done if the teachers kept their eyes open, and if the parents were vigilant; being told that You Are Grounded would wreck the plot.

But on a handful of drama shows, there's a real venom to it. Radio Free Roscoe is about a group of heroic teens who defy a tyrannical school administration. On a smaller scale, Degrassi the Next Generation has episodes where it is implied that stealing school property is no big deal, but it's disgraceful to inform on the thief.

Shows where Adults Are Useless can also be shows where you Can't Get Away with Nuthin' -- kids who break school rules somehow always get caught, but due to bad luck, not because a teacher was alert.

Also common when adults are told something is happening, but simply don't believe it, resulting in a Cassandra Truth. The logical extreme of this trope is There Are No Adults.

Gives the impression that only teens or younger kids are capable of saving the world and stuff. Can lead to the Family-Unfriendly Aesop that there's no point in telling adults about your problems because they'd either disbelieve you or be too useless to help.

This trope can occasionally be used in a more mature fashion to make an Aesop about growing up and realizing that adults are not all-powerful. This is especially common in military or war-themed shows and literature, where the point is that adults are ultimately unable to protect the younger generation. This version is, unfortunately, often Truth in Television. Another interpretation of this is merely that the adults who can help won't because the dilemma's solution (at least the obvious and often more exciting one) would pretty much wind up breaking several laws and safety codes. This can be especially true in a lot of shows involving the police or military; the ones who strictly adhere to code are always shown incompetent whereas the ones who break code are the competent ones.

Another seldom-used aspect of this trope sort of plays off the above. In this version, it's not that Adults are useless; quite the opposite. The problem is that the protagonists-because of youthful embarrassment, a need to prove themselves or simple ego- can't ask for help, or accept it when it's given. The message here is that asking for help is a good thing (one can't do everything alone) and not bothering to trust people with more skill/experience ultimately causes more trouble than it's worth. This version is also Truth in Television, but you'll not find many young people who are willing to admit that.

Sometimes; it may be a simple case of Poor Communication Kills - sometimes the adults seem worthless because they aren't seeing it from the characters' point of view. Or a combination of the above where the kids simply don't tell the adults so they don't know.

Parental Obliviousness and Police Are Useless are subtropes. An Obstructive Bureaucrat may show up, but it's not something the younger age group encounters often.

See also: Teenage Wasteland, Competence Zone, Parent Ex Machina, Best Years of Your Life, Lazy Husband, Babysitter From Hell. For an inversion, see Teens Are Monsters.

Not to be confused with Humans Are Bastards, which deals with everybody being violently like this.

Anime & Manga
"Nagisa: "Adults act like heroes but all they really want is to control us children.""
 * Future Boy Conan: Conan is an uber-capable 10~12 year old, capable of running roughshod over all the adults in the series. His female co-star Lanna is similarly, if not as totally, capable.
 * Fullmetal Alchemist: Kinda mentions this
 * Of course, the military personnel are actually far from being incompetent.
 * More than that, the adults are highly skilled, extremely intelligent, and almost as central to the plot as Ed and Al. If anything, it's a bit of a deconstruction: the brothers thinking adults are useless gets them into a fair bit of extra trouble.
 * Mazinger Z: Plays with it but subverts it. The weapon most powerful in the world is handed over to a teenager, and Dr. Hell and his servants (who are all adults) are unable defeat a bunch of teenagers... but neither Kouji nor Sayaka nor Shiro -nor Boss and his gang- would have been capable of protecting humankind and defeat Dr. Hell if they would not been supported by plenty adults. All workers in the Institute (starting with Prof. Yumi, who was a good scientist and strategist) were fully competent and without them Mazinger Z would have not got the frequent upgrades, repairs and maintainance it needed. This situation was repeated in the sequels: Great Mazinger and UFO Robo Grendizer.
 * Yu-Gi-Oh! GX: Heavily lampshaded in Season 3, usually by Asuka and Kenzan, as the kids easily resign themselves to the fact that the adults have fallen apart and it's up to them to take charge. Principal Sameshima might also be a Deconstruction, since from the start, having to repeatedly burden teenagers with the responsibility of saving the world truly causes him a great deal of guilt and inner-turmoil.
 * Zigzagged in Detective Conan / Case Closed,where many of the adults are worthless and the case is solved by an apparent six year old.
 * Zig-zagged especially with Kogoro. He's shown to be a bumbling fool several episodes (Especially early on) and is an alcoholic and sometimes physically hurts Conan. However, averted because he actually does come to conclusions a lot of real life detectives would and actually knows some stuff Conan doesn't. (He's more street-smart; Conan's more Book-smart.) His biggest shortcoming is that he's competent, but impatient. Averted when the case is personal or if Ran or Conan are threatened, then he becomes scarily competent. There have been several cases where he got it mostly right and just needed a couple hints from Conan, or where he got it all right but only realized it after Conan did. (He's slower.)
 * However, note that Shinichi's father Yuusaku is just as good a detective as he is, if not even better. He's only useless because he's simply almost never there and he'd rather continue writing about mysteries than solving them.
 * Ultimately averted, though, by the fact that Conan is almost an adult himself (he just LOOKS like a kid).
 * If anything; Megure is perhaps the most worthless of the adults - he's so strictly adhered to police code that he refuses to take a leap of faith and think maybe not all cases are like the ones you learn about in the police academy.
 * Also averted with a good deal of recurring characters like the members of the FBI and CIA . There are a lot of members of the Black Organisation who are much smarter than Shinichi/Conan like Vermouth, Gin, Pisco or Irish (Movie 13). The Police also isn't completely useless, they are pretty competent at what they are doing, it is just that the cases shown are not solvable without thinking out of the box like Conan does. There are even police officers like Miwako Sato, Wataru Takagi, Kansuke Yamato and Yui Uehara who are able to solve a good chunk of many cases on their own. Not to mention Heiji's father, chief commissioner of the Osaka Police Department Heizo Hattori, who in addition to being very smart is also an uber-badass.
 * The only competent adult presence in Dennou Coil, other than the main character's manipulative grandmother, turns out to be seventeen and still in high school.
 * Being a series intended for kids, Digimon tends to apply this; to which degree varies from series to series:
 * Digimon Adventure played it straight; since no adult had a digimon partner (even though some of them didn't need one), and only digimon are powerful enough to fight another digimon, it meant that parents had to watch their kids saving the world
 * Digimon Adventure 02 is even more straight about this, since even the adult villain was ultimately a puppet for the Big Bad which the kids then had to defeat
 * Digimon Tamers averts it, since even though adults still don't have digimon partners, they are able to kill digimon by other means, know a lot more about them than the kids, provide technical support and ultimately it's them that make it possible for the Big Bad to be defeated.
 * Digimon Frontier only has human adults in the backstory, and have the kids saving the world by themselves since all the digimon (some of them "adults, so to speak) die at one point (even if not permanently), so it plays the troupe very straight.
 * Digimon Savers Averts it, since humans manly/hotblooded enough can punch out skyscraper sized digimon (by the tip of their weapons), adults can now have digimon partners and nearly everything that went wrong is due to an sorry excuse for an human adult.
 * Digimon Xros Wars plays it straight in a similar way to Frontier, since the adults remain completely unaware that Digimon even exist.
 * Higurashi no Naku Koro ni subverts this,.
 * This Trope is eventually subverted in Bleach when we find out
 * Further, one of the newer arcs featured the main characters, most of whom are teenagers, getting owned in rapid succession by the Espada until the Shinigami Captains showed up to save their lives.
 * The most recent arc has the Shinigami Captains once again showing up to save Ichigo's ass from the Fullbringers.
 * The mother of Hinako Aikawa in Bitter Virgin is arguably worse than useless. Not only did she flat-out refuse to believe her new husband was molesting her daughter Hinako until Hinako's second pregnancy, she also made a point of hiding the first pregnancy from him so he wouldn't know "what a horrible kid" Hinako was. In fairness, when she finally did accept the truth, the first thing she did was chase said husband out of the house with a knife, and soon they moved away.
 * Neon Genesis Evangelion deconstructs the hell out of this.
 * Not to mention the fact that the eponymous Eva units are piloted primarily by children.
 * Averted in Highschool of the Dead, where the adults are just as competent, often more so, than the teenagers depicted in the story. This trope is particularly averted by Takagi's Badass parents.
 * In Great Teacher Onizuka (GTO), the only adult who seems to be competent at anything is Onizuka himself. And even then, he's only lucky.
 * Justified Trope. The kids of the manga are actively fighting their teachers and other authority figures. It's hard to be useful to people who will completely ruin you just for trying. And it's not luck that lets Onizuka get through to them, it's the sheer fact that they are incapable of hurting, beating, embarrassing or otherwise driving him away.
 * In Haruhi Suzumiya, the only character over 20 who actually does anything is Future Mikuru (and it's questionable if she counts, as she's just an aged-up version of an existing teenaged character). This may be due to the fact that
 * In Mahou Sensei Negima, After the True Companions went back in time to Set Right What Once Went Wrong, some of them went straight for help from the adults. After being heard, they were told to leave the rest to the grown-ups, to which Weasel Mascot Chamo responded by saying "Tsk, tsk, tsk. You don't get it, principal. History has already proven that it's no good to leave things to you guys. You should leave things to us here." In the end, while they did help, it was the students who saved the day while the adults were useless (mostly because the Big Bad had already developed countermeasures for them).
 * There's also a number of aversions, as there were several useful adults around, but they all sat off to the side and watched. Later chapters see the adults actually getting involved a little more.
 * Most adults, and atleast one of them is a Badass Grandpa, have proven to be anything but useless, what with saving Negi's behind after he was OHKO'ed by the incoming Big Bad.
 * Mostly averted in Naruto. Throughout the first half of the series, the adults actually do most of the important, high-level fighting. Post-Time Skip, where the "Rookies" begin carrying the majority of the weight, it's portrayed not as this trope, but of the new generation taking up the mantle of their predecessors.
 * In the manga Bio Meat, nearly every bad decision concerning the outbreaks were made by adults. The only right decisions and almost every heroic act were done by children or the four main characters as adults.
 * In the manga Cage of Eden, EVERY SINGLE ADULT until Oomori takes a level in badass (initially, she was scared of a small, harmless furry animal) as well as using useful first aid skills.
 * School Days. The only adult that appears is their homeroom teacher. And true to trope, what few interactions he has with the main characters is essentially telling them to shut up so he can get on with class.
 * In Fruits Basket, virtually every adult is neglectful or outright abusive. As a child, Yuki is forced to stay with a person who verbally abuses him and his mother brushes his complaints off. Kyo is completely hated by his father, who does absolutely nothing to prevent him from . Akito's . Rin is abandoned by her parents, so they are totally unaware when she is . All of the older servants in the household allow Akito to act freely, because they feel that the has the right to treat the Zodiac any way.
 * Also, Kyoko's parents neglected her, and kicked her out of her house after Her father tells Katsuya that he's crazy when he tells him that he hopes to marry her.
 * Averted in Soul Eater as most of the adult characters are far more powerful than the teenaged main characters and end up saving their lives at some points.
 * Even once the kids are shown to have improved significantly, the adults are still around being not-useless. For example they're acting in the background during the Baba Yaga arc, and now during this new storyline; Yumi with Kirikou's group, Tezcatlipoca disrupting Black Star's fight with Crona.
 * 'Salvage' has a group of them heading for Noah in the real world, as Spartoi hunt for Kid within the Book. Shinigami's not relying purely on the kids, it seems.
 * Although this is a bad example since the entire adult squad gets worfed in just a few panels.
 * Sadly true. It wasn't, technically, when the example was written.
 * In the manga Bloody Monday it seems that the only heroes capable of doing anything competent are high school students, from the legendary hacker Falcon to the master archer. In fact,
 * Both subverted in Kenichi: The Mightiest Disciple, as Kenichi's master are much stronger than anyone that Kenichi fights, but they will not interfere in his battles unless he's fighting a master class opponent.
 * Let's Lagoon: There's only one adult, he just washed up on the island and is probably injured, but he's pretty useless (and probably had a thing going on with the female castaway) which irritates the resourceful protagonist to no end.
 * Turns out he didn't have a thing going on with the female castaway, but instead her sister.
 * In Mai-HiME, most of the adults seem to have a very strong Weirdness Censor in play, and the few that aren't are almost all tools of the Ancient Conspiracy.
 * On the other hand, Midori is an adult and is arguably the great unsung hero of the series as well as being the most level headed of the HiME (despite first impressions to the contrary). Additionally, Natsuki's adult contacts provide her with a lot of useful information and one of them also bales her, Mai, and Mikoto out of some trouble they had managed to get themselves into. Furthermore, while most of the adults have little knowledge of what's going on around them, most of them seem to be quite competent within their own professional spheres (and it's also worth noting that the majority of the younger characters are rather in the dark about what's going on as well).
 * In the first arc of Round Vernian Vifam we have a bunch of children holed up in an abandoned military installation with some weapons, and elsewhere on the same planet we have the Terran military in a state-of-the-art underground facility. The children manage to beat back several enemy attacks, while the military base gets wiped out along with all personnel after just one.
 * Straight up with Gakuen Ouji where none of the teachers notice the rape of the boys, the absurd bullying and just the general horridness of all of the students. The beatings... seriously, the amount of rape and general sexual abuse is ridiculous- in the corridors! First chapter somebody screams and the teacher doesn't care. Somebody screaming 'let me out' in a locked room, they put it down to a ghost and don't check. It's a Wallbanger how any of them got that job.
 * In The Drifting Classroom, every adult in the school ends up dead or insane within the first few volumes.
 * Satou Kashi no Dangan wa Uchinukenai: Nagisa comes to this conclusion after talking with her teacher about her friend's abusive father.
 * Satou Kashi no Dangan wa Uchinukenai: Nagisa comes to this conclusion after talking with her teacher about her friend's abusive father.


 * Alien Nine has a premise where all of the adults at an elementary school stay inside heavily armored rooms while sending their students to capture the aggressive aliens.
 * It didn't help that at least some of the adults, namely the teacher in charge of the school's alien catching group, and the principal, were deliberately useless as part of some sort of conspiracy. The rest of the adults were just useless. Yuri's mother is especially bad; Yuri comes home from an alien assault that is awfully reminiscent of a rape, and her mother just tells her to cheer up and do her job.
 * In FLCL most of the adults are literally more immature than the children in the story.
 * Teachers in Iris Zero manga mostly don’t concern themselves with their students’ problems. They claim it’s impossible for normal adult to comprehend things connected with Irises. It goes as far as ignoring an event that leaves the student body in fear and Toru being heavily bullied due to his lack of power.
 * Haruka's mother in Psychic Detective Yakumo does not put up any fight, protest, plea, when her daughter wants to walk into a potentially dangerous situation to rescue Yakumo.
 * Loveless, oh so much so. Pretty much every adult is either abusive, inneffective, or emotionally fucked up enough to not be able to help, whether that's with Ritsuka being abused by his mother or all those 12 year old kids running around on their own getting into spell battles.
 * Bible Black is probably the ultimate example. The teens who the story focus on are having sex just about everywhere, sometimes non-consensual,sometimes with teachers, and the only adults who seem to be around are Takashiro, who becomes a victim of this, and Kitami, who eggs it on and participates in it.
 * Used as a plot necessity in the Lost Children Arc in Berserk (even implied in the title). With the exception of Guts, every adult present is either a violent and sick pervert, a completely clueless moron, or a useless coward. Turns out that the Big Bad of this arc is a teenaged girl apostle who turns the local children into her spawn to join her elf fantasy land, all of them being very lethal, while she makes adults into spawn to use essentially as her own Cannon Fodder as punishment for treating children so poorly. Also, the village children who aren't turned into monsters seem more ballsy than the adults around them, namely Jill.

Comics

 * In Marvel's Runaways, the teen heroes don't trust any of the adult characters, even Captain America. Civil War only cements their "Adults are tools" mentality.
 * Cloak and Dagger nearly subvert this, by finding out what's really going on in Los Angeles and telling the kids that they'll get in contact with Captain America and send him to take out the Pride..
 * Spider-Man's cameo also subverts it, to a degree.
 * The Ultimate Spider-Man series by Brian Michael Bendis puts a big emphasis on Peter Parker being a teenager, and hanging out with his teenage friends. The other books of the Ultimate Marvel line also retool just about every other major Marvel hero as an asshole (because that's way edgier). This can lead to plenty of times when Peter risks his neck for his heroes only to find they don't share his ideals or views of responsibility, and are often ungrateful for his efforts. While the Adults aren't exactly useless, Spidey has good reason to be pissed off whenever he deals with them.
 * Even Nick Fury can often make stupid decisions that come back to haunt Peter, like building the Spider-Slayers or locking up supervillains without trial. Peter even once got beaten up by Daredevil for attempting to help him in a fight and yelled at for being too young. Really, binging on the Ultimate Spider-Man books really makes you realize just how many people are dicks in the Ultimate Universe.
 * When you think about it, you have to feel really bad for the guy. The entire series takes place over only 6 months, and he's still just a high schooler who's in way over his head. And he can't get help from the super-hero community, because they're ALL JERKS. There is not a single super-hero who was kind or supportive to him except maybe for three X-Men and The Fantastic Four, and they're the same age he is. Kitty even got kicked out of the X-Men when she insisted they go help him.
 * Peter even lampshades this in one exchange with a teacher at his high school; he questions why the Kingpin (a known crime lord) is allowed to walk free, she gives a pat answer about due process and such, and he explodes, asking whether people's idealism somehow disappears the moment they turn twenty.
 * Barry Ween tends to fall into this pattern. When adults aren't outright antagonists, they're either clueless or helpless. Justified in that since Barry is a "boy genius," he's naturally the smartest person in the room all the time.
 * Aversion: The adults in Gladstone's School for World Conquerors are typically famous super villains and are quite important to the plot.
 * In The Beano The adults and teachers never seem to be able to prevent their kids from misbehaving. In older strips they would whack their kids with slippers or a cane but now it seems the kids never seem to get much in the way of a punishment apart from making their parents really angry.
 * Averted in Super Dinosaur where the adults perform important support roles if they aren't directly in the action. The Kingstons repair SD's armor while Dr. Dynamo creates valuable new technology.

Fan Works

 * Parodied in Episode 3 of Gag Dub Yu-Gi-Oh the Abridged Series by, of all people, Tristan -- "Don't our parents even care that we're missing?"
 * Shining Pretty Cure. The only adult who even suspects something might be going on is Ren, the friendly owner of the neighbourhood cafe.
 * Lampshaded and then averted in Futari wa Pretty Cure Blue Moon. Dawn/ notes that she's supposed to leave fighting evil to the thirteen-year-old title characters, but doesn't seem to be very happy about it. Near the end of the series, she becomes an active combatant.
 * Stephen Ratliff's Marissa Star Trek universe is notorious for this. In order for Marissa's "kids crew" to be great, every adult they come up against has to be a bumbling imbecile. In one episode, the Maquis even invented a drug that knocked out everyone over the age of 15.
 * In Kyon: Big Damn Hero, Kyon's parents are like this. Other adults are, fortunately, far more useful.
 * A major topic of discussion in Harry Potter and The Methods of Rationality, with Harry frequently telling others how adults who do not treat him as an equal are obstacles to be dodged or manipulated (including those very adults).
 * The adults in Oh God Not Again are more useless than usual, but mainly because, unlike Harry, they don't have knowledge from the future, so you can hardly blame them for being behind. Harry does sometimes get them involved on purpose when they can help, such as going straight to Dumbledore when Hagrid gets Norbert.
 * Adults in Calvin and Hobbes The Series are, at the very least, very unobservant.
 * The counselors in Calvin At Camp let the kids get away with just about anything, aside from actually leaving.

Films -- Animation

 * The Land Before Time III. Not long after a meteor storm, the Great Valley's main water supply, a river running down from beyond the wall, mysteriously dries up. Rather than say, investigating the river's source (they could have sent fliers if they were worried about carnivores), the adults decide to wait in the valley and hope the water returns. In the meantime, water is running low, tempers are running high and all the food is quickly dying off. In the end, it's the children who accidentally find out that the water was blocked off and even then the adults can't agree on a plan of action and guess what? The children save the day! Again! By accident! Again!
 * This is a very common occurrence throughout the series. None of the adults want to risk personal safety going out into the Mysterious Beyond for any reason whatsoever, leaving the children to do everything themselves.
 * An especially notable moment comes in the fourth film, where Littlefoot's grandmother (who had been willing before to leave and search for a flower with healing properties) and the mother of a new character not only fail to go after their runaway children but don't even seem worried or concerned that the kids are gone.
 * Both used and subverted in Coraline. Coraline's parents didn't do much. But Bobinsky gave Coraline a subtle warning and Spink and Forcible also warned her that she was in terrible danger. And at the end,

Films -- Live Action

 * The Lost Boys has a group of 12-year-old vampire hunters attempting (and at one point succeeding) to kill the group of teenage vampires. In fact all the main characters are younger than 20 with the adults being unaware until the big reveal at the end where one character displays he knew what was going on all along.
 * In the recent Transformers movie, much of the first tier of authority that Sam Witwicky encounters regarding the title being is best summed up by his disbelieving question of a police officer, "Are you on drugs?!" Note that this only applies to the civilian adults. Those involved in the military usually perform rather well considering the circumstances, even if it's not always the best actions to take.
 * The first A Nightmare on Elm Street. Nancy's mother helped start the whole thing, her father doesn't do anything and the rest of the police only hinder her or ignore her frantic cries for help.
 * The sequels more or less follow suit with a bizarre subversion in Freddy vs. Jason. It turns out that the more people are aware and afraid of Freddy (these two usually go hand by hand) the more powerful he becomes. Hence when the adults really got down to it they effectively eliminated the threat by erasing all written notions of Freddy, banning his name or any details from mentioning and submitting those kids who still remembered about him to a dream-depriving drug treatment. He did eventually find a loophole but still they did their best.
 * Every single John Hughes film.
 * Battle Royale. Not only does the government allow the capture of entire classrooms of children, but they allow putting them on an island, giving them deadly weapons, and telling them to go kill each other, last one alive wins and is free to go. On top of that, the parents never even TRY to save their children from being murdered, and instead the entire country (or possibly even the world) allows it to happen, waiting for the competition to end and see the winner.
 * In the original novel, most parents, upon hearing their children have become part of the Program, merely resign themselves. Those who do resist are gunned down.
 * This is true in both the manga and novel; the first chapter of the book hints it, and the manga integrates it into at least one character's back story.
 * The Fratellis in The Goonies suffer this from time to time in their confrontations with the Goonies. They seem to be able to handle the cops (and Feds) just fine, but they can't quite handle a bunch of teenagers.
 * The Good Son has the most wall-banging use of this trope ever, from start to finish.
 * Joshua's only use for adults is to be pawns in his plan.
 * The Night of the Hunter: Rachel Cooper, the foster mother who takes in the Harper children, is the only adult in the film who is immune to Harry Powell's charms. Uncle Birdie does put in an effort, but after
 * In War Games, two teenagers are the only people who seem to be willing and able to avert nuclear holocaust, while parents, four-star generals and nuclear scientists act befuddled or indifferent.
 * The three children in Hocus Pocus try to inform adults and enlist their help against the witches. It always fails.
 * It doesn't help that the witches turn around Max's attempted warnings to their advantage (they pretend that he's giving them an introduction and give a musical act ) or the fact that they enchant a large number of adults to "dance until [they] die".
 * Then there's the fact that the the witches have come back from the grave prank has probably been played a million times in that town given the local notoriety of the events surrounding said witches.
 * Matilda is full of this. Not a single student at Crunchem Hall manages to convince their parents that Ms. Trunchbull is abusive towards everyone.
 * This is explained in the books, that the Trunchbull uses such extreme punishments that no parent would possibly believe them. It's also mentioned that Trunchbull treats the parents the same way she treats the kids.
 * This was probably the single worst thing about the 2004 Thunderbirds movie, which shoved most of International Rescue out of the way to leave the plot to the Kid Appeal Character Alan Tracy, Brains' son, and Tin Tin (all of whom are pre-teens). Yeeah.
 * This was subverted in the 2009 remake of The Karate Kid. Mr Han trained Dre for the tournament. Dre's mother supported him and would have beat the snot out of the kids who messed with her son, if she knew who they were. And the school principal sent both Dre and Cheng out after Cheng purposely tripped Dre, not favouring one side over the other. And she kept an eye out for Dre on the school trip, indirectly preventing Cheng from bullying him.
 * The main character in The Tin Drum realizes this and refuses to age past three years old. Of course, this means that he eventually becomes a chronological adult but remains a Spoiled Brat of a child.
 * Mystery Team. The main characters insist that they're more suited to solve the case than THE POLICE.
 * In Mikey the only characters that seem to display any common sense about Mikey's behavior are his teacher and Jessie.
 * In the Hallmark Channel made-for-TV movie The Santa Incident, Santa has to rely on the help of a couple of kids. Most of the other adults are Homeland Security goons who mistake him for a terrorist.

Literature
""We shall secure the school against He-Who-Must-Not-Be-Named while you search for this -- this object." "Is that possible?" "I think so," said Professor McGonagall dryly, "we teachers are rather good at magic, you know.""
 * Justified in Animorphs as many of the protagonists don't want to risk the lives of others and they also know there are few they can actually trust due to alien infestations. This is occasionally subverted however.
 * Zigzagged in The Candy Shop War. The kids parents are completely unhelpful . The other adults, however, do manage to help the kids.
 * Justified in Orson Scott Card's Earthfall, in which one of the teenagers asks the oversoul why no one in the older generation is standing up to Elemak's tyranny, and it explains that they don't dare while he's holding their children hostage. The children being held, of course, are free to act (apart from being locked up).
 * Also Justified in Ender's Game, where the adults don't intervene when several students conspire to attack Ender, so he'll be forced to deal with it himself and not rely on anybody helping him.
 * Also justified in Shadow of the Hegemon, where Ender's mom reveals that they knew all along about Peter and Valentine's online personas but decided not to interfere. They read everything Peter publishes and then pretend not to know anything about international politics. They also were smart enough to know that trying to teach religion to a child after infancy is pointless.
 * With the exception of the Snicket siblings, nearly every adult in A Series of Unfortunate Events is outrageously stupid, and often cruel. Even the adults who genuinely want to help the Baudelaires fail them at a crucial moment due to their fears or strange philosophy.
 * (This is referenced, at least, in Lemony Snicket -- The Unauthorized Autobiography, in which it is revealed that the supposedly volunteer organization V.F.D. kidnaps small children to join its ranks.)
 * "Mr. Poe meant well, but a jar of mustard probably also means well and would do a better job of keeping the Beaudelaires out of danger."
 * Stephen King's IT, the children in the Loser's Club are the only ones who know what's really going on in Derry. The adults are ineffectual and many of the Losers have troubled home lives: Beverly Marsh's father is physically abusive, Eddie Kaspbrak's mother is neurotic and smothering and Bill Denbrough's parents spend all of their time grieving for their younger son George and ignoring Bill.
 * The book lampshades this at one point, when a character comments that the adults who do care become (however vaguely) aware that Derry is a Town with a Dark Secret and move away.
 * This happens constantly in Harry Potter. On the other hand, it is also occasionally averted and subverted, particularly in the massive battle near the end of the last book:


 * It is lightly implied that Dumbledore does this intentionally in order to train Harry without the latter being aware of it, especially in the first book. And, when the adults actually do do something, it tends to be pretty spectacular- the Battle in the Atrium and the Inferi cave, in particular.
 * Played straightest in Goblet. Several powerful wizards vow to find out how Harry's name got into the cup, and apparently find out nothing over the course of an entire school year.
 * Subverted in the Grey Griffins series. Adults save the kids' asses a lot. Adults are pretty powerful, in fact, on both the hero and villain side of things. The number of important adult characters looking out for the Kid Heroes is in fact a plot point, as the main character is rich and has a bodyguard with some magical friends.
 * In the build up to the Author Filibuster that was the fourth book, during the third book in the YA Maximum Ride series, one of the characters starts a child uprising against adults. Naturally, there's no such thing as a web-faring adult to also support/argue the issues, and the adults really are responsible for it all. After all, every adult so far in the series is evil, no matter how long they spend being friendly to begin with.
 * Except Valencia Martinez, who is fairly useful and kind. (Although admittedly, )
 * In Rick Riordan's Percy Jackson and The Olympians series, there is a rather surprising lack of adult half-bloods. In fact, only one has been seen so far. Granted, this is somewhat subverted in that there ARE useful adults, they just don't have mystical magical powers.
 * The implication being that most of the half-bloods are killed off by various monsters before they reach full adulthood, as Quintus pointed out.
 * However, there have been some mentions of a few historical figures (who reached adulthood) being half-blood as well. Such as Harriet Tubman, daughter of Hermes.
 * A few?
 * Chiron has a wall full of photographs of successful adult Half-Bloods.
 * ''The Heroes of Olympus averts this for the Roman Camp with a whole city of adult Veterans and others out in the real world who will help questors on request.
 * The Tomorrow Series: Those few adults that the teenagers do have contact with are either unable to offer help, or are completely incompetent.
 * Aimee by Mary Beth Miller: Almost all of the adults in the book are/were useless.The most egregious example is Aimee's family: Her dad was a crazy Fundamentalist preacher, her real mom was a drunk and a player, and her step mom was abusive . You get the picture.
 * In the Circle of Magic series, adults tend to be useful, excepting Street Magic- when Briar attempts to get stone mage Jebilu Stoneslicer to teach Evvy, Stoneslicer proves himself to be selfish and useless- he tells Briar to take Evvy away from Chammur and to send her to Winding Circle. He then proceeds to make a number of assumptions about Evvy based solely on the fact that she is a poor orphan, and tells Briar that she will never get anywhere because of that. He does agree to teach her only after Rosethorn talks to him, and is later revealed to be the worst possible teacher for Evvy. Not to mention the scene when Briar is questioned by the mutabir, or leader of Chammur- Briar repeatedly suggests possible crimes to charge Lady Zenadia with, only to be informed that she is too high in rank to be bothered with such charges, and like Stoneslicer, the mutabir dismisses the teenage gang, the Vipers, and Evvy as poor people of no real value, and not worth helping.
 * In Robin McKinley's Deerskin, a novel in which a king takes a rather unhealthy interest in his daughter, several adults notice this but neither do or say a thing to help her even when he announces he plans to marry her, because their king is above reproach. This does not end well.
 * Averted in the Young Wizards series, where the adult wizards actually listen to and believe the child wizards, and the adult wizards, although having less raw power than the child wizards, have a lot more skill and knowledge. The child wizards still get to go on (dangerous) adventures, though, since fighting evil is the job of every wizard, regardless of age, and the adult wizards have their hands full with their own battles against evil.
 * Just about every Goosebumps book. Yes, some arguably have the excuse of magic hiding what's going on, but some cases are just silly. For example, in Say Cheese and Die...Again, the narrator is cursed to continually gain weight, putting on more than three hundred pounds in one day, and his parents chalk it up to an allergy attack and leave him to just go to school as normal the next day. Even though he can't fit in their car. Meanwhile, his friend was cursed to continue to lose weight until she looks like "a stick with a lemon on the top", and again is just sent to school as normal. The site Blogger Beware even has a "Questionable Parenting" section for each story.
 * Chicken Chicken (book #53 of the original series) is even worse. It's painfully obvious that Crystal and Cole are turning into chickens (what with their feathers appearing and their lips turning hard and beak-like) and the parents DO NOTHING. To make matters worse, they're preparing chicken for a barbecue in front of their affected kids and they laugh at Crystal and Cole when they start acting like chickens during the barbecue. No wonder Troy Steele (the guy who does Blogger Beware) hates his book.
 * Did any of the adults (i.e. Ned and Alice Wakefield and/or the Sweet Valley Police) in Sweet Valley High ever do anything to prevent the insanity that coalesced around those "perfect size six" twins? Kidnappings, Murders, Rapes, all somehow involving the same two girls, the perpetrators constantly getting away only to cause 3-4 books worth of harassment. Parents who apparently allowed their 7 year old children the range of teenagers (if you think I'm kidding, go read some Sweet Valley Twins books where the kids go adventuring at night.)
 * Every single adult in the book Little Chicago, save for a doctor and nurse at the start (and the protagonist's barely-adult sister) are horribly useless. After the eleven-year-old protagonist, Blacky, is molested by a family friend, he sees a social worker about it and the molester is put in jail. But after that, his mother is a neglectful woman who's almost constantly in a daze, stopped taking prescribed medicine for vanity purposes, and brought a drunk man home--and she doesn't really seem to care that Blacky was molested. Rather, she visits the man in prison and actually brings Blacky a letter he'd written for him (which had sexual harassment in it). The teachers and principal at school don't notice or do anything about Blacky being bullied, despite the teacher even witnessing some of it in her classroom. When Blacky is called to the principal's office, it's on behalf of the bullies, who claim Blacky is disturbing them, rather than the other way around. Then the social worker comes to Blacky's house, sees the horrible shape the home is in and how out of it his mom is, and doesn't do anything about it.
 * In the Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, with the exception of Jim, every adult that Huck meets is some kind of murderer, thief, charlatan, liar or phony. Of course, one of the points of the novel is the irony all those people like that looking down on a decent human being like Jim because he's black.
 * Played straight and averted in the Babysitters Club books. Some of the parents, particularly those of the sitters themselves, are intelligent, reasonable, helpful people. Others are well-meaning but a bit clueless, and have to be given insight into their children's fears and wants by the sitters because they don't pick up on them otherwise. Possibly the straightest example of the trope are Jessi's parents, who thought it was perfectly acceptable to leave their eleven-year-old daughter in charge of her eight-year-old sister and two-year-old brother for an entire weekend.
 * In the kids' book Class Three All At Sea, the kids get captured by pirates on a school trip. Where's the teacher while this is going on? Making out with one of the pirates. Seriously.
 * The Green-Sky Trilogy has a lot of this. Raamo and his friends (considered young adults at 13) are members of a caste that actually shuts out family, so after meeting Raamo's parents in some detail at the beginning of Book One, they drop out of sight except for rare glimpses. Neither they nor Teera's parents are important to the plot. They cannot be confided in or help with the vastly important goings-on. On the other hand, the elderly priestess D'ol Falla is a central figure, and Genaa's dad contributes to Book Three.
 * The Trixie Belden series is full of this. The main characters are teenagers who solve mysteries that the adults cannot.
 * The parents in M.T. Anderson's Pals in Peril series.
 * This is the lesson Coira learns very young in White as Snow; her parents don't remember she exists, her nurse resents having to take care of her, and her nurse's replacement fails to give her what she really needs. Coira ends up practically raising herself and talks to none of them.
 * Room Oneby Andrew Clements (author of Frindle) zigzags and plays with this. The hero reads mysteries, and when he encounters one, decides not to tell adults because in all the books he has read, they are useless or obstructive.
 * Shows up sometimes in Someone Elses War. Entirely justifiable when it does, because it's a novel about Child Soldiers rebelling against the adults who kidnapped them in the first place.

Live Action TV
"Principal Figgins: It wasn't our job to know. Emma: Then whose job was it?"
 * In 3-2-1-Contact's "The Bloodhound Gang" segments, the adults who are the targets of con artists are typically complete idiots to the point where one easy mark has his own child have control of his own finances.
 * The Australian kids' show Mirror Mirror managed an odd variant, where, aside from the Old Man, who was managing what has to be one of the most epic Gambit Roulettes ever, all the adults were at least plausibly incompetent (if not outright evil), mainly because only a few of them had any idea of exactly what the hell was going on.
 * For the record: The adults in Louisa's family had no idea, and their tutor was in the pay of their rather nasty neighbour, who was hiding the son of Tsar Nicholas II, in a ploy to sell him back to Russia. As for Jo, her father gets clued in, but can't use the mirror. The worst offender would have been Dr Coigley, who was unknowingly working for the Old Man.
 * Arguably Arrested Development, as while all of the adults in the show constantly make terrible decisions and ruin any good thing that they get, George-Michael is running a relatively successful business and Maeby
 * Buffy the Vampire Slayer has a curious take on this. While Giles and Jenny Calendar are undeniably useful, and Buffy's mother proves quite smart and sensible once she finds out the truth about her daughter, adult society is thoroughly useless. There is no adult organization which is not either evil (the Mayor and his administration), staggeringly incompetent (the Watchers), or both (the Initiative). The only possible exception is the coven which sends Giles to stop Willow at the end of season six; but they didn't get much, or indeed any, screen time. If they had, no doubt they'd have turned out to be a front organization for some kind of demonic cult.
 * Snyder. And how.
 * Did anyone else watch all those kids dying all the time on the show and ask themselves 'Don't these people have parents?!'
 * The one time the parents decided they should do something about the way at least one of their children dies every week, it was because a demon was influencing them.
 * The worst case was in the season 6 premiere when demon bikers attacked the town and there was no one to defend it. No cops, firemen or rescue personnel accounted for.
 * Beverly Hills, 90210, for some extent, with the obvious exception of Brandon and Brenda's parents (who were originally part of the main cast). As the series progressed, teens got into, or were affected by, much more serious troubles (guns, paedophilia, addiction, mafia, rape) and their parents were either oblivious or useless. The '90210' sequel also has that a bit: drugs, a hit-and-run death, stalking... and only Annie's and Dixon's folks actually do something (and only occasionally).
 * Space Cases. The two present adults on the show are literally unable to pilot the ship and almost seem to be the Butt Monkey characters. The former may actually be a bit explained, since one can assume that since they didn't touch the walls as long as the kids did (in the first episode) or that they were the last two to board the ship that the living spaceship saw the kids as the "Complete" crew.
 * The android Thelma is also worthless to Cloudcuckoolander levels - then again, she's not really an adult to begin with.
 * The various Power Rangers series do this to frightening levels. Not only do they have a team of six teenagers saving the world, there never seemed to be any kind of competent adult to help even with non-monster related things (For example, if a monster attacked at, say, a carnival, there never seemed to be any adults helping lead people to safety.)
 * Since Lost Galaxy the adults started to have a major role, especially in Lost Galaxy, Lightspeed Rescue, Time Force and RPM
 * One particularly egregious example comes from the episode "The Ninja Encounter". A baby in a stroller is rolling down a hill. The adults literally jump out of the way, as if the baby stroller was a runaway train. It's left to the main cast of teenagers to rescue the infant.
 * In Gossip Girl almost every significant adult, one way or another, is irresponsible, clueless, idiotic, indifferent about the whereabouts of the teen characters, or those adults are incapable of controlling the teen actions.
 * To break this down a little: Lily Van Der Woodsen is shown to care more about the family's status than her children and is constantly shown as clueless to the point where her son and youngest child often has to spell things out to her. Bart Bass is a womanizing hard-ass who serves mostly to remind Chuck of all the ways in which he isn't good enough when he's not . Eleanor Waldorf is rarely home and when she is seems only to be able of criticizing Blair and Nate's parents are . Even Rufus Humphrey, who compared to the others is something of a model parent, is often shown as stubborn to the point of pig-headed and unable to accept that his children are capable of making their own choices and dealing with the subsequent consequences. And let's not forget how his ex-wife disappeared to Hudson and only came back when her teenage daughter showed up on her doorstep and demanded she did so.
 * On the other hand, certain of the more minor adults fare better. The prime example being Cyrus Rose who, although constantly berated by Blair as being annoying, constantly shows himself to be supportive and even useful on occasion.
 * Are You Afraid of the Dark? featured the Cassandra Truth variety. Your parents will never believe your neighbors are vampires.
 * Parents in Spellbinder nurture inexplicable reluctance to believe in their teenage children's stories about parallel words and intruders therefrom. However, once presented with undeniable proofs, they become much more competent.
 * iCarly: Heavily lampshaded in multiple episodes. Each adult has his or her own brand of eccentricity.
 * Subverted by Principal Franklin, who's competent, if overly lenient, and occasionally by Spencer. Spencer and Carly's grandfather, who only appeared in one episode, was almost freakishly competent.
 * The extent that the adults in the Japanese drama Shokojo Sera simply lets the bullying and torment happen to poor Seira can be extremely frustrating to watch. They could be downright evil and cruel, like Mimura Chieko who runs the school. Or they could be clueless and utterly incompetent, like Mimura Emiko, sister of Chieko. Or sometimes they gleefully take advantage of Seira and Kaito and bully them around, like the chef and his wife. Or perhaps they could be like Aran Yukio, a French teacher, who does want to help Seira, but lacks the power to really change anything. Not to mention he isn't around all the time at the school to help Seira.
 * The teacher from Everybody Hates Chris is probably a frontrunning example in this section. She's witnessed Chris attacked by Caruso, but usually does nothing to stop or even acknowledge it. In one moment bordering on Lawful Stupid, she gave Chris a 0 on a test, despite the fact that he got every question right, but because he entered each answer on the wrong line. It didn't look to be a scantron, where it would be justified, either.
 * In Glee there don't seem to be any repercussions for "slushie facials," or really any of the bullying. Even when Kurt is being constantly harassed for his sexuality (eventually leading to a threat against his life), the only adults willing to help seem to be his father and Sue Sylvester. . This trope is most strongly embodied in Principal Figgins, who appears to have full-time possession of his own private Idiot Ball, though spare ones are available for all the other staff members in the school to use. The stupidity of Figgins really stands out in the fact that he believes that Perky Goth Tina is.
 * Lampshaded in the episode On My Way. When Karofsky  the faculty of McKinley conference in the principal's office. Among the things said, Sue says that   Will says that


 * In Wizards of Waverly Place, all of the Russo children, but neither of the parents, have magical powers. This works out about as well as you'd expect.

Music

 * Quadrophenia shows the other side of this- even though the plot opens with Jimmy asking for help from a therapist, preacher, and his mom, as events wear on it's implied (even all but stated) that the real problem is that he can't accept help. As a work about youth, this makes perfect sense really, but considering his epiphany at the end, perhaps he can't be blamed for having to find his own way.

Puppet Shows

 * Subverted hard by The Children's Television Workshop and Sesame Street. Mr. Snuffleupagus was originally created as a way for children to relate to having an imaginary friend whom adults didn't believe in. The problem, though, was that Snuffy was undeniably real; it was just the adults' bad luck that they never ran into him. Critics pointed out children could interpret the situation another way: Adults would never believe you even when you're telling the truth - a dangerous moral when trying to get kids to report child abuse to an authority like a teacher or the police. As a result, Snuffy was revealed to the adults, and to drive the point home, the adults even apologized to Big Bird for not believing him.
 * However played straight in Abby Flying Fairy School with Ms. Sparklenose.

Tabletop Games

 * In Pokethulhu, player characters are required to be 16 or under... everybody above high school age is either terrified and in hiding or dangerously insane.
 * Teenage Mutants From Outer Space takes this trope and cranks it Up to Eleven. The rules specifically state that characters either have militant parent who will punish even the smallest infraction harshly, or hippie parents that refuse to take an interest in your life. However, since the main point of the character interaction is teenaged drama, having antagonistic parent works.

Theater

 * Euripides' Alcestis: Admetus is enraged that not even his parents could bring themselves to die for him, causing Alcestis to die instead.
 * William Shakespeare's Romeo and Juliet. The teenage protagonists are halted at every turn by their parents and other authority figures. Friar Laurence tries to help, but he decides the best way to do this is marry the pair and hope for the best. It didn't end well.
 * This really isn't a case of Adults are Useless so much as it is a severe case of Lust Makes You a fucking MORON, as the adults try and offer fairly decent advice, but the protagonists are too blinded, deafened, and otherwise rendered Too Dumb to Live by love to bother listening to it, or even think more than five minutes ahead.
 * Ironically, Friar Laurence's original plan would have worked, if events had played out the way he expected. He just had no way to foresee the murder of Tybalt and how that would complicate the plot.


 * At the end of West Side Story, the few adults who have appeared in the story are left alone on stage after the youth gangs carry Tony away, emphasizing how little the supposed authority figures have done.
 * Being based on the above-mentioned Romeo and Juliet, this is unsurprising. And lampshaded for all authority figures in the song Dear Officer Krupke. The adults are useless even to one another.
 * In the musical Thirteen, the only kid whose parents are mentioned is Evan, when his parents get divorced and when Archie guilts Evan's mom into buying tickets to the R- rated movie "The Bloodmaster."
 * This is probably the fourth strongest theme in Spring Awakening. The first three being sex, sex and sex.

Video Games

 * Pretty much any RPG where the main characters are almost always under 20, often around 14-18. Normally there is one or two older characters to act as a sage or adviser.
 * Taken to absolutely ridiculous extremes in the Pokémon games, where criminal gangs do everything from stealing/mutilating/killing Pokémon to attempted Apocalypse How, and the only person who ever does anything worth mentioning about it is the ten- to fifteen-year-old Player Character.
 * Every single Zelda game portrays Link as either a pre-teen child, or a mid-late teenager. An entire kingdom of guards, warriors, military, wizards, and sages, and it takes a kid (albeit one with a very special destiny) to save the day. Multiple times. And most times there's at least one NPC who dismisses him as a stupid kid who doesn't understand. The original game averts the trope only because there are a grand total of five characters in the game; The Legend of Zelda Twilight Princess is possibly the only one to date where he's been treated with appropriate levels of respect by a larger cast.
 * Slightly averted in that several games, Link (occasionally with Zelda's or others' help) is actually a contributor to or cause of . He always fixes it by the end, so it's not quite the aversion it could be.
 * Zelda gets in on the action too, her standout example being The Legend of Zelda Ocarina of Time. While her plan isn't exactly golden, at least she knew an obvious Big Bad when she saw him.
 * This was at least justified in The Legend of Zelda the Minish Cap, in which the Picori/Minish would only willingly appear to a child.
 * A major theme in Final Fantasy VIII: Adults start wars that get out of hand or lock the super-dictator in a box and throw their hands in the air when she inevitably gets out, and it's all left to the super-capable SeeDs to clean up the mess.
 * Most of the adults in Earthbound are incompetent. The police force of Onett fights Ness for whatever reason, and loses. Some of the Happy Happy cultists are too busy painting cows blue to care for their children back in Twoson. The Runaway Five is continually in debt everywhere they go. Pokey's dad in Fourside is seen riding off of his son's success, and later in the game he's lost everything.
 * Strongly featured in the Touch Detective series. The most competent ones often turn out to be psychopaths.
 * Oddly inverted in Persona 2. The high schoolers that star in Innocent Sin mess everything up, and the adults in Eternal Punishment have to fix things. Although Tatsuya does join in later on.
 * Absent in Persona 3 which features adults in on the masquerade to some extent and try to help you outside of the main conflict region of the Midnight Hour, but can't do anything directly. Also, one of the first tier BigBads is an adult.
 * Justified in Persona 4 where the conflict occurs in a region where the police have no access and the people who do are either indoctrinated into the masquerade or are former victims. The Adults Are Useless because they just couldn't know what's really going on. The police close the case when someone falsely admits to all of the murders; and, even late in the game when you are straightforward about your "extracurricular activities," Dojima-san doesn't believe you.
 * Put to obnoxiously Anvilicious use in Wild Arms 4. You'll be sick of seeing it played out by the time you clear the first dungeon.
 * Mega Man Battle Network is especially cruel - Literally all of the adults are either just standing around, willing to netbattle instead of try to fix things, or nothing. The only competent adults are either involved with the WWW (Even Baryl & Colonel), Mr. Higsby, (For different reasons) or Lan's dad.
 * Chaud lampshades this when he mentions that the official netbattlers are all off in la-la-land.
 * The spiritual sequel series Mega Man Star Force also uses this, but since there are only a handful of people around the world capable of wave changing, including the villains, all of whom have roughly the same amount of experience, there is no logical reason why a kid can't be the most naturally gifted member of that group.
 * Bully. Surprisingly one of the most accurate portrayals of this trope. It's set in a school, one that's plagued by bullying. Even if the student body consists of about 70 people, the adults and the four prefects seem to just stand there going, "Duuuuuuuuh" while Gary manipulates all the cliques into fighting with each other. Even if the prefects (and adults) do chase Jimmy and can be seen occasionally busting a student, it's obvious the prefects are power-hungry jerks who're oblivious to most of the stuff that goes on in the school, and so are the adults. (i.e., the nerds are able to construct potato gun turrets in the astronomy club building without alerting adults and it's implied they have no supervision, the jocks throw explosive-laden footballs at a student, the gym gets lit on fire and nobody calls the police unless you fail and nobody even mentions it afterwords.) It's safe to say even if the game has a realistic portrayal of how useless adults can be in a school setting; you can probably rest easily given that if this happened in real life, people WOULD call the police and the school would be closed in a year. (Mr. Burton especially would be fired for encouraging the bullying and .)
 * It's shown that Dr. Crabblesnitch actually can be a Reasonable Authority Figure, too. He just didn't know what was going on until it was too late. This leads to a couple of the (realistic) interpretations where the adults aren't necessarily useless, they just seem that way because they don't know. Chances are, Dr. Crabblesnitch would have stepped in sooner or later; but you can beat up as many prefects as you want; even his own secretary and merely get detention.
 * There are whole two adults in the Rose Garden Orphanage in Rule of Rose, and the one with actual authority is a problem, not a helper, with his implied sexual abuse of the teenaged residents, and while the cleaning lady is more observant, it doesn't matter since the Police Are Useless and won't listen to her, and she gets murdered for her troubles.
 * The Colour Tuesday has the adults of the world at the mercy of being turned into puppets by the Others. Children aren't affected. Combines with Competence Zone.
 * Escape From St Marys: Adults mostly seem indifferent to your characters' pleas for help on after encountering increasingly bizarre phenomena.

Web Comics

 * Deconstructed in Gunnerkrigg Court. Antimony treats the teachers at the Court like they're useless, even those who have proved themselves competent and far more knowledgeable about the ongoing weirdness than she is. As a result, she nearly dies several times. (Annie's distrust appears to stem from the fact she had no shortage of Useless Adults in her life prior to enrollment at the Court: She could see The Guides; none of the staff at Good Hope could.)
 * This is addressed in Chapter 28: Sprimg Heeled, Part 2, where Jones finally calls out Antimony on this, pointing out that the situation with could have been solved more quickly and with fewer problems if she had spoken to someone about it. Given that she  her words have weight. Unfortunately, Annie doesn't seem to have learned any lessons from this...
 * Also deconstructed in the fact that there's a very good reason not to trust some of the adults at the Court:  The problem is that the adults are very powerful and competent people ... and that is exactly why you should fear them, because some of them are not good people.
 * Penny and Aggie has slipped into this. While adults used to be shown as being reasonably aware of things you'd expect them to know about their kids, "The Popsicle War" has a student widely publicize a video in which she accuses another student of lesbian rape, to the point where even all the students at a completely different school know about it within a few hours... and not a single adult shows awareness of this, not even the administrators you'd expect to be concerned about a student rapist in their population.
 * Averted gradually but decisively with regard to Cyndi's dangerous and sadistic schemes, beginning in "Her Private Chambers" when Penny's parents, overhearing her and Stan discussing what she's done, resolve to act as Penny's "allies" in stopping her. In "Mister Smiles," Lynda acts on this by calling Cyndi's mother about her actions. Although this doesn't have an immediate effect, because Cyndi's an excellent liar and actor, it does plant the first seeds of suspicion in her mother, at least. Finally, at the climax of "Missing Person," the FBI, investigating, examines her laptop, which her parents surrendered, and finds on it a private journal in which she details her past and future plans to  . When Cyndi's parents view this after  , they.
 * Averted in "The Last Summer of Youth: May," when Penny's parents, Rob and Lynda, prevent a potential date rape at her party--and do it with style.
 * In Suicide for Hire, nobody seems to bother to investigate what their teenage offspring are up to, nor get suspicious at the rash of teen suicides (despite their utter lack of subtlety). Two adults so far have found out about SFH, but only in order to request its services.
 * Precocious sometimes subverts and sometimes plays straight this trope. Most of the parents are just as smart as their kids, but the stuff those kids can get away with is astonishing sometimes.
 * Yuki's father in Ménage à 3 doesn't seem to be intentionally abusive, but he paid so little attention to his daughter that she was repeatedly exposed to the hentai rape artwork he drew, which traumatised her so much she now has an intense fear of penises.
 * "TENTACLES!"
 * Subverted in Homestuck. At first the adults seem like simple foils for the kids. Then John's dad is seemingly easily captured by the imps, and you expect the parents to be simple plot devices. Then it turns out that he and the other kids' guardians are immensely powerful and important to the game.
 * Massively subverted in El Goonish Shive. If it isn't apparent from that panel alone, everyone really did seem to have spent the past few years ignoring the problem and hoping for the best. This qualifies as a Crowning Moment of Awesome for Mr. Verres.
 * El Goonish Shive zigzags this trope a bit at times, though with justification. While Mr. Verres is certainly not useless, he was eventually Kicked Upstairs due to how close he was getting to the comic's various situations, so that he's no longer in as convenient a position to be helpful. Likewise, Raven is most certainly not useless, but is forbidden to involve himself in situations where magic isn't present, so his helpfulness is also limited. There's also Jerry, who was only introduced to the plot just as he was about to die and be reborn, which, as he points out, will limit his helpfulness for a time.
 * Memoria: The police won't look for Winston. More bewildering, their perfectly loving parents let them go look for Winston with little more than giving them money and instructing them to come back in a few days if they don't succeed.
 * In The Adventures of Shan Shan, his parents can't tell what's really happening, and his father doesn't seem to care.
 * While adults in To Prevent World Peace aren't actually *useless* (in fact, one of the main characters is in her thirties), the magic system revolves around basically-always-teenage-and-younger girls. Subverted somewhat in that the main characters' parents were not only aware she was a magical girl, they actually helped design her costume.
 * In Weapon Brown, Jason Yungbluth's side comics about Clarissa, a kindergartener being repeatedly raped by her horrible, passive-aggressive father, feature nothing but useless adults. Her entire family knows about the abuse, and her kindergarten teacher is far, far too dense to interpret any of Clarissa's numerous pleas and drawings as the cries for help they very obviously are.
 * In Weapon Brown, Jason Yungbluth's side comics about Clarissa, a kindergartener being repeatedly raped by her horrible, passive-aggressive father, feature nothing but useless adults. Her entire family knows about the abuse, and her kindergarten teacher is far, far too dense to interpret any of Clarissa's numerous pleas and drawings as the cries for help they very obviously are.

Web Original

 * In Lonelygirl15, all of the TAAG's parents who aren't dead are this.
 * Bree's dad does display competence, for a while.
 * In Greek Ninja it's a group of teenagers running around trying to save the day.
 * Adults, at least in the Pregame of Survival of the Fittest, are almost always unable to stop any fights, bullying, drug use, stealing, etc. The main reason of this is that if handlers want to establish their characters as "bad", they don't want to have them be caught by adults, as that would ruin the reputation.
 * Subverted to an extent in the v4 pre-game, where players were warned that inappropriate behaviour, if caught, would result in exclusion from the school trip.
 * In KIKEN, this is a Deconstructed Trope. That's because adults aren't entirely useless -- some want to change the world, but are trying to balance their careers (i.e. Emiri, Juuri, Yukari and Yamato) and some are too cynical or apathetic to even believe in a changing Earth (i.e. Takeo).

Western Animation

 * Taken to extremes that are getting more disturbing every episode in Scooby Doo Mystery Incorporated. Fred's dad actually expressed joy at the thought of him and the gang being attacked by a swarm a cicadas that had put three people in the hospital.
 * Taken Up to Eleven in the Season Finale.
 * A source of much of the humor on South Park, where it is always up to the kids to save the day while the adults run around either clueless, panicking, or distracted. Stan Marsh's father Randy in particular is wonderfully stupid and easily led.
 * A particular example is in "Cripple Fight," where a crowd of adults allows the title event to occur until both children are basically beaten and worn to exhaustion... and THEN an adult comes forward, saying, "Alright, boys, break it up..."
 * The movie is a particularly good example of this trope. The opening song even includes the line "Off to the movies we shall go/where we learn everything that we know/'cause the movies teach us what our parents don't have time to say".
 * Taken to extremes in the season 6 episode 'Child Abduction Isn't Funny' when the parents, in response to sensationalist news feels the only way to keep themselves from kidnapping their kids is to send them off into the wild. 4 days and a Mongolian invasion later, the parents think the kids have somehow become Mongolians and forgotten civilization. Kids are not amused.
 * "I know our parents have done some stupid crap before, but Jesus Christ."
 * Seriously, almost all of the adults in this show are about a point or two above in IQ compared to a bag of rocks. The only ones that aren't are either killed, amoral, regretful, or are very close to killing themselves by the time they have any significant time onscreen. Any other sane people aren't usually seen, are gotten rid of quickly, or suffer from the various antics within the show with the exception being Chef for a while.
 * The fact that the sanest person on South Park currently is Liane, the town whore, says a lot.
 * Recess has been known to go in and out of this trope. Adults in the show tend to vary between the primary antagonist (at least for the episode) to recurring obstacle to often siding with the children. And nevertheless, they are frequently portrayed as being worthless. In a startling realistic scenario, Ms. Finster actually tells a bully to leave Gus alone only for him to flat out ignore it and she is nowhere to be seen for the rest of the episode. (And neither is Randall, who you would think would find prime tattling material except for that he is afraid of them too.)
 * Really; we can add a lot of things done by some of the kids on that playground to this list. Half the stuff people do in Recess on a regular basis seem to be ignored by adults. Doesn't help that Ms. Finster is more keen on looking for kids chewing bubble gum or bringing outside toys in.
 * Miss Grotke ususally subverts this trope, as she's usually always standing up for what the kids belive in and giving them advice, but at the same time, she can be pretty oblivious to the gang's plans.
 * Weirdly, the only consistently Reasonable Authority Figure is King Bob -- the child-appointed sovereign of the playground. He's nine.
 * Eleven or twelve, actually--one episode and The Movie revealed he was a sixth-grader. Still counts, though.
 * Subverted in The Movie. It starts out like this, but then the kids bite off more than they can chew trying to stop the Evil Plot™ and the faculty have to rescue them.
 * In Storm Hawks, the entire free world is at risk of being overrun by a teenage supervillain... and the only people who can save the day are a bunch of plucky teen heroes. The only adults seen are either tiny elderly folk or cannon fodder.
 * Plenty of other Sky Knight squadrons are seen, but they rarely end up being useful. It's partly because they tend to stick to their own terras, whereas the Storm Hawks have no ties to anyplace in particular and are free to roam the world and get into crazy adventures.
 * Averted with Stork, who is one of the Storm Hawks and arguably an adult, albeit a young one (early 20's, not that you'd think it). He's a Non-Action Guy, but still manages to be one of the most memorable characters.
 * Also averted with Starling, a Sky Knight who lost her squadron. Like the Storm Hawks, she seems to travel a lot.
 * WITCH averts this trope by having many adult characters, most villains, constantly outsmarting and one-upping the heroes. Especially in the second season when some of the villains
 * In Rugrats the adults are criminally unaware, social services level unaware! Then again, who would imagine that babies would be the main characters?
 * Taken to an extreme in "Chuckie's Wonderful Life", where Chuckie is the only one preventing Angelica and other babies from turning the town into a Dystopia.
 * In one one episode the parents visit a plant nursery, put the kids down in the MIDDLE OF THE STORE, and walk away like it's normal, proceeding with their shopping.
 * The babies were also wandering around the entire store riding/pushing a shopping cart along, often threatened by falling plants and mean looking dogs. Did none of the other customers or employees take notice of this?
 * The PBS show Arthur does a Take That to the Rugrats in one episode, where baby Kate is watching something similar to it, and questions where the parents are at. She switches the show to one like the Teletubbies, which she approves of.
 * Cracked #313 (December 1996) parodied it with the kids doing things like smoking and sticking scissors in their eyes, while their parents left for Mexico. The parody ended with them being taken to court for criminal negligence, but getting pardoned because the judge thought the kids were so ugly, no sane person would want them.
 * Avatar: The Last Airbender half-averts this trope. The number of times the main characters have encountered useless, ineffectual or just plain stupid adults (Lao Bei Fong, General Fong) is about equal to the number of encounters with scarily competent and powerful adults (Iroh, King Bumi). Some are marginally useful, but rarely affect the plot directly (Hakoda, Piandao).
 * In the third season, there are a number of useful adults, particularly during the Invasion. Most notably Sokka and Katara's father Hakoda, although Teo's Mad Scientist dad is also right behind him. The Boulder and the Hippo, along with Hugh and the Swamp Benders, also rank high. Naturally,.
 * And then the Grand Finale has.
 * In all, it's more like Adults Are Useless until they become an Old Master, and then they get the appropriate degree of competence. So it's more like Avatar has an InCompetence Zone.
 * Really, the adults are less useless on average than the children - it's more a problem of "next to Aang, Iroh, and Azula, no-one with significant screen time seems consequential."
 * SpongeBob SquarePants: SpongeBob tells Ms. Puff to protect him from a threatening bully. That SpongeBob has to spell it out for her after the bully's drawn pictures of himself beating up the sponge is already dumb enough, but then he hears that she specifically used his name while talking to the bully about it. Said bully even threatens his own father when SpongeBob tries to use him for help.
 * Ms. Puff is probably doing this deliberately - she really dislikes SpongeBob and his antics and is getting sadistic joy out of watching him squirm.
 * SpongeBob himself too, since he is supposedly an adult in the show yet acts like a child who really has no business living on his own. Really, the only competent character in that show seems to be Sandy (and even she has a bit of Bunny Ears Lawyer to her).
 * Squidward's usual snarkiness could count here too - at least until he gives in to all the lunacy around him...
 * Averted in Kim Possible, where all the main characters' parents (well, except Ron's mother, who appears to be completely oblivious to her son or what he does) help save the day at least once.
 * Codename: Kids Next Door, of course. In it, almost all the characters over thirteen (including teenagers) are either malicious, ignorant, or incompetent. This is of course excusable since as the title implies, it's a show for young children.
 * However one of the Operatives' father turns out to be
 * There's also Numbuh Two's mother in her first appearance, when she defeats the Common Cold after the Kids have been unable to do so. Of course this was fairly early in the series and Mrs. Gilligan has a completely different personality in all subsequent appearances.
 * Pick any adult on Moral Orel and you'll find some degree of uselessness or Jerkassery. Topping the list, however, are Orel's parents. His dad Clay injured Orel on a hunting trip and got so madly drunk that even Cheerful Child Orel was forced to see his father for what he was; Orel's mother, Bloberta, took over 10 episodes to realize their younger son Shapey got switched with Block, the younger son of their Distaff Counterparts the Posabules. Then there's the overall neglect of Shapey and Block, which consists of doing nothing while they play with any dangerous device you can imagine (and some you can't).
 * The episode "Innocent" Lampshades this by having the adults realize their careless advice is often what causes Orel (who takes things literally) to do the crazy things that he does. They're forced to acknowledge that maybe they don't actually know what they're talking about * gasp!* . Their "solution" isn't much better. The adults, including Orel's dad, try to avoid Orel entirely and, failing that, try to avoid giving advice and passes him off on someone else. The end result:
 * Later on in the show, however, Reverend Rod Putty and Coach Daniel Stopframe subvert this, actually doing their part to help Orel.
 * Subverted in The Venture Brothers, where the title characters are accident-prone morons. True, their dad isn't very useful, but that's more because he doesn't care rather than any real incompetence. And of course Brock Samson more than makes up for anything Doc Venture is lacking in.
 * Doc Venture is more cynical than incompetent, being a traumatized-adult parody of Jonny Quest (in addition to "Action Johnny"). In fact it's unknown which part of the Rusty Venture cartoon-show is real, since it's implied that all of his childhood-adventures actually happened.
 * After season 3, Doctor Venture is pretty much forced to care about his sons now that he can't just keep cloning them. Orpheus, having gone into his mind, finds an army of Hank and Dean zombies wandering around inside Venture's mind looking for their father to love them. Orpheus mentions that they're the manifestation of Rusty's guilt of being apathetic enough toward his sons to clone them so he doesn't actually have to take care of them.
 * Naturally also averted in Jonny Quest, where the boys provide minimal help for Race and Dr. Quest.
 * Partially averted with Helen Morgendorfer in Daria who shows in at least one episode that it's good to have a high powered lawyer in the family and, very occasionally, shows signs of genuine wisdom. Played straight with all the other adults in the series except one of Daria's aunts (naturally, she's a lot like Daria).
 * Adults are so useless in Peanuts that they never appear onscreen or have any lines. Their voices are simulated by a muted trombone.
 * That is taken from the comic strip, which was done that way to keep eye-level with the kids. Taller adults would have not worked in that format.
 * This trope was always played straight in the strip, however, as the general message is that the kids are on their own to fend for themselves-- particularly via their various philosophical musings and Lucy's "Psychiatric Help" stand.
 * Every adult in The Fairly Odd Parents is either incompetent (Mr. Turner, the Mayor), clueless (Mrs. Turner, Principal Waxaplax), indifferent (the Dinklebergs, the Buxaplentys), cowardly (Vicky's parents), or flat out evil (Crocker, Doug Dimmadome). Even on Yugopotamia, Mark's parents are utterly useless in an emergency (such as the Gigglepie invasion or the attempted assassination of Grippulon). Fairy adults seem fairly competent, albeit eccentric.
 * Everyone above 10, actually.
 * And Timmy had to coin that quote at the top...
 * The Show is a parody on abusive, negligent, self-centered modern parents, after all, to the point that Timmy has to dream up fairy-godparents since he's functionally an abused orphan.
 * Code Lyoko subverts, plays straight and generally runs all over the place with this trope. At first, the middle-school heroes won't tell any adults about their virtual battles with XANA because they think (probably correctly) that the first thing the adults would do is shut down the Supercomputer that's causing all the trouble, which in turn might kill Aelita. Yumi later lampshades and tries to subvert this trope when XANA threatens to cause a nuclear meltdown, saying that they're in way over their heads and need to tell somebody what's going on. The group narrowly decides to do so, but the adults are too distracted to do anything more than dismiss her with "you're Just a Kid". Still later, some of the teachers, particularly their P.E. teacher Jim, prove to be resourceful and heroic once they're pulled into the fight, but the show's Reset Button premise ensures that the Masquerade's always back in place by the end of each episode. Meanwhile, the middle-aged creator of Lyoko would probably be tremendously useful, if he weren't the The Ghost; as it is, he appears only through flashbacks, impostors, or by triggering the occasional Deus Ex Machina from off-screen.
 * While not every adult is useless, most adults on The Simpsons are fairly incompetent. Especially if they're a member of the police department.
 * Not really. Eddie and Lou are pretty competent, all things considered. The only reason why Clancy Wiggum is the police chief
 * The Simpsons creator Matt Groening talks about many of the adult characters as morons. He said in an interview that authority isn't always quite as smart as it should be, and people like teachers and doctors all have flaws.
 * Blatantly used in Treehouse Of Horrors V where Bart and Lisa tell Marge about the cannibalism going on in their school, and Marge promptly dismisses them telling them that she cannot fight all their battles and they should forcefully tell the teachers to not eat them.
 * In A Pup Named Scooby-Doo, the kids end up chasing a lot of people in costumes committing a number of illegal acts. Yet adults never seem to step in on any of the cases, even if minors risk getting injured and will sometimes actually hire the kids themselves. This was lampshaded in at least one episode when Fred asks a client why they aren't going to the police instead.
 * Subverted in King of the Hill where Hank and Peggy are always willing and able to get Bobby out of any trouble he might find himself in, and can even handle any problems that they themselves start. The other adults on the show however, particularly Bill and Dale...
 * Somewhat the case in the 80's Nickelodeon cartoon The Mysterious Cities of Gold. The three child protagonists repeatedly outsmart, escape, or defeat in combat entire groups of Spanish soldiers. Even in times where they had adult help, either the children were treated as leaders and guiders, or they ultimately ended up not being very helpful at all. Along the way they manage to solve several Incan mysteries the rest of the adults were incapable of figuring out.
 * Invader Zim. Every single adult (and most of the children, for that matter) is completely oblivious to the fact that Zim is an alien, despite being, as Dib points out, green, with no ears. Mrs. Bitters in particular isn't just useless, she's downright sadistic.
 * In the Futurama episode Teenage Mutant Leela Hurdles, when the cast is reverted back to being teenagers, Leela requests that her parents ground her, arguing that she never had such an experience. She then sneaks out through the window.
 * Her dad also tried to get her to drink tequila out of a silly straw.
 * Although, this isn't really an example, mostly because they know she's really over 21 and are confused that she wants privileges taken from her.
 * Pretty much all of the adults in Family Guy have become complete idiots in recent years who will follow anything anyone with a microphone or megaphone says even if it's really dangerous or completely idiotic.
 * The only competent adults are Brian and Lois. And as the series progressed, much of Lois's competence was absorbed by Brian. Now Lois is mostly apathetic to her children's problems (which she wasn't before) and now Brian is pretty much the only adult in the show capable of using any sort of logic in their lives.
 * Joe Swanson is an aversion. He's likely the only truly competent person in town, barring the fact that he is a bit of a hard-nose, he's usually just doing his job.
 * Adults in Jimmy Neutron Boy Genius are either never around (most of the parents), completely stupid (Jimmy's dad) or don't get onto the kids until the end.
 * The quite possible worst example of this is probably one episode where Jimmy was being beaten up by a bully repeatedly at school. His parents assumed it was a girl and that he had found a girlfriend, even though he was coming home with BRUISES. It eventually got to the point where Jimmy had to invent something to protect him!
 * The action in every episode of Inspector Gadget revolves around the comically inept title character unknowingly putting himself in grave danger while his ten-year-old niece and canine sidekick have to protect him from himself and solve the case all by themselves. Other adults (e.g. Da Chief) tend to be competent and intelligent, however, so Gadget is the exception in this universe, not the rule. Possibly his idiocy stems from having a helicopter in his head.
 * However; this has been interpreted as Obfuscating Stupidity. Proponents of this school of thought say that Gadget (And possibly even Da Chief!) is aware that his ten year old niece and his dog are the ones doing all the work. They seem to have the formula down to a T, Inspector Gadget walks around getting into trouble and keeps the criminals (for the most part) distracted, while the case is solved from the shadows by Penny and Brain. He also takes the credit for it, so MAD only targets him. There have been occasions where he knew Penny and/or Brain was in danger and then becomes scarily competent.
 * In Young Justice, this is usually averted by the Justice League. But there were a few instances, such as in the episode "Humanity" where the league (which includes Batman) were completely unsuccessfully in tracking down Red Tornado despite weeks of effort. The team proceeds to find him and foil the villain's plan in one day.
 * In "Failsafe", the entire team is defeated by the invading aliens without achieving any victory where the team was successful in running numerous offense action.
 * Surprisingly averted in The Weekenders. The characters' parents are all reasonable authority figures who're receptive and in-touch with their children, and just about always have the right thing to say. (Especially Tino's mom, who is Genre Savvy.) Even Tish's mom, when she is shown as acting like a child eventually realizes that it was bothering Tish and stopped, but nevertheless enjoyed the weekend she spent with Tish and her friends. Carver's dad, portrayed as a rather uncaring authority figure by Carver is simply just stern...and it was Carver misinterpreting every chore and favour as a "punishment".

Real Life

 * In this elaborate prank played on three children aged eight, six and five, the entire neighbourhood bands together to make the siblings believe they're all under attack from zombies. The kids rig their house with a variety of traps, and when the zombie attacks their home, they fight back with tabasco sauce, plastic dinosaurs, wet sponges, cling-wrap, and finally their own tiny, ineffectual fists. Holed up in the bedroom, the children are told by the show presenter that if they don't work together, the zombie will eat them, at which point one of the boys explodes: "Don't you dare say that the zombie will get me! You haven't helped us at all!!"
 * Bullying. Bullied children often have a difficult time getting help from adults - some adults see it as a Rite of Passage, some assume that the bullied child is oversensitive, others may just think it's not a big deal and some may believe that the child being accused of bullying would never do such a thing because of a certain status (such as having straight A's).
 * This is especially true when the bullying is between siblings. Many adults are unable to distinguish the difference between sibling rivalry and outright bullying. And it's especially true if the younger sibling is the bully, as the older one will likely be accused of making up stories for the sake of attention and ignored (this is the reason the youngest of siblings is often considered "spoiled").
 * There have been cases where emergency phone calls by children have been mistaken for prank calls.
 * As much as some schools claim to be strict on fighting, you'd be surprised at how often students get away with it (oddly enough, though unsurprising, it's not uncommon that a student faces suspension for something as minor as not being in "proper" uniform).
 * Made even worse when in some schools, when a fight breaks out, the person who was assaulted first and merely fights back to defend gets in just as much trouble as the aggressor. Great job, school admins.
 * Happens often in abusive households where one parent or step-parent abuses their child(ren), while the other ignores it, whether out of denial, fear of their partner, apathy, or malice. "Why didn't you protect me?" is often one of the first questions a survivor asks when trying to reconcile with a complicit parent.
 * This tends to happen with teens who are suffering from depression and/or suicidal feelings, especially girls. Many adults blow it off as hormones and regular moodiness and may not realize there's a genuine problem until it's too late.