Taking the Kids

It's a classic scenario we all have seen. Husband and wife have a heated argument about their relationship. Maybe cheating is involved, or maybe one or both parties just can't stand the life they have together anymore. After a shouting match, she storms out, but not before taking the kids with her. As an alternate scenario, she just leaves, taking the kids and leaving a note while the husband is out at work.

The direction this trope ends up taking is largely dependent on what the motivations of the significant other are in this situation. If a woman is dealing with an abusive husband (regardless of whether he's abusive to her, the kids, or both), then she is in the right and the husband is a villainous character whom we are clearly supposed to be rooting against. If she is shown to be an unpleasant character who is very selfishly taking the kids away as a means of spiting her husband, the husband is usually the hero.

Another scenario involves relatively little animosity between the two at all- if the husband has gotten embroiled in a crazy Conspiracy Theory and the wife thinks he is losing his mind, then she can leave while Taking the Kids without any real hard feelings. Sure, the theory that Little Green Men are preparing to invade the planet might actually be true, but usually the husband and the audience can understand why the wife is skeptical and worried about the situation and don't hold it against her. In this situation, you can usually expect a happy reunion at the end once all the craziness is over with.

If the estrangement explicitly turns into a divorce proceeding, usually the wife either gains full custody or the lion's share of the joint custody arrangement- which makes this trope general Truth in Television as custody cases tend to tilt toward the mother unless the father holds a very clear monetary advantage over his ex-wife. Even then the usual outcome is not sole but joint custody.

For extra drama, you can make one of the two abduct the kids and take them far away from the other.

It should be noted that in some countries, leaving and taking the kids counts as both spousal abandonment and kidnapping, regardless of their sex.

Examples of Taking the Kids include:

Anime and Manga

• In Kure-nai Souju managed this posthumously by getting Benika to promise to kidnap Murasaki and take her away from the Kuhoin estate.
• Used as an Establishing Character Moment in Monster: early into his first spotlight episode, Inspector Runge comes home from work to find his wife and daughter standing by the door with their bags packed, waiting for a taxi. He barely notices.

Film

• Your typical Lifetime Movie of the Week involves a woman who is married with kids will usually portray this trope with the father as a villain, and may contain undertones of The Unfair Sex if the writer don't do a good enough job of showing why the father is a bad person.
• In About a Boy, though the main character's mother is his primary guardian (which she arguably doesn't deserve to be, since she's refusing to seek treatment for mental illness in a way that's fairly damaging for her son), she actually wants to work out a visitation arrangement with Will, Hugh Grant's character, who isn't related to her or her son at all. It's a father/son story where the father still has no involvement with the kid (he appears for three minutes in the film at a Christmas dinner).
• Also shown in a subplot of American Gangster.
• Attempted in Casino, but the wife comes back, given that her husband is in the mob.
• In Close Encounters of the Third Kind, Roy Neary appears to be going crazy over his obsession with UFOs and creating sculptures of mountains, causing his wife and children severe emotional distress. His wife finally takes the kids and leaves him.
• The Fan, where the main character's wife taking his only son is one of the main things that drive him to homicidal rage and murder.
• In the film Amadeus, when Costanze loses her patience with Wolfgang Mozart's obsession with the hooded stranger, she gives him an ultimatum. When he sneaks out at night and then returns the next morning, he finds all her clothes gone, then discovers that neither she nor their son is in the apartment.
• Used in Kramer vs. Kramer; the positive angle is on the divorced dad.
• At the beginning of Liar Liar Jim Carrey's ex-wife is threatening to take their son and go move with her boyfriend in Boston- something which the lying, immature Carrey doesn't take seriously, and the audience sympathizes with her decision. However, by the end of the movie after Jim Carrey has realized just how important his son is to him, he makes a dramatic effort to stop her- and the audience is hoping he succeeds.
  • Early on in the same movie, Jim Carrey convinces a Gold Digger client through some hilarious Straw Feminist arguments that she deserves a substantial portion of her husband's fortune to strike a blow for women everywhere. This is morphed to a Dude, Not Funny moment later on when she uses this same argument to justify Taking the Kids- for child support payments, when up to this point she had shown no interest in having custody.
• An unusual variation in The Mask of Zorro: Don Diego's baby Elena is esentially abducted by his arch nemesis Don Rafael, who then raises the girl as his own. He justifies this (in his own mind, at least) by his unrequited love for Diego's wife (apart from this, though, he does at least seem to be a relatively good father to her).
• This conflict drives the plot of Mrs. Doubtfire.
• In The Pursuit of Happyness, which is based on Chris Gardner's Real Life. Gardner's wife, after an argument, leaves while Gardner is away and takes his son with her. Gardner catches up to them at his son's school the next day, and tells his wife in no uncertain terms never to take his son away from him again, regardless of any problems they might have. The wife, who has her own issues, eventually becomes an Absent Parent. At least in the movie.
  • In Real Life too, although under different circumstances.
• This is part of the storyline of The Santa Clause. Tim Allen's character's wife wants full custody of his son now that she's getting married, which is something neither he nor his son want. Of course, it doesn't help that he's slowly turning into Santa Claus, and his wife thinks he's going crazy, going so far as to arrest him when he goes out with his son on the fateful Christmas sleigh ride. It also doesn't help that her new husband is a shrink (and a bit of an ass).
• The movie My One and Only, set in the 50s, starts with The Ditz wife catching her rich husband with another woman, so she hits the road with her two sons. The sympathy's initially less with her than with the Only Sane Man son, though eventually she gets some Character Development. The mostly unlikeable husband spends the movie waiting for them to come back because he's quite certain they'll never learn to support themselves, though when he finds out otherwise, he seems willing enough to let them go before he dies.
• Micheal Corleone's wife Kay plans to do this in The Godfather Part 2. He refuses to let her, but frames his refusal with pleas for her to stay and work out their problems. When she reveals that she didn't miscarry their last child but instead had an abortion, he makes it clear he no longer wants anything to do with her—he slaps her—but again states that "you won't take my children!" She refuses to be cowed by this, stating "they're my children too!"

Literature

• The Spiderwick Chronicles is built on this. The mother took the kids and left because her husband was cheating, and one of the kids still idolizes the dad because he was Locked Out of the Loop.
• In Olivia Goldsmith's Young Wives, Jada gave her husband an ultimatum: give up his mistress and try to make the marriage work. He then filed for divorce and complete custody, although she'd been sole breadwinner and doing all the homemaking, hence the ultimatum, crowning it with a demand for alimony. In the end, played straight as she kidnaps the kids and takes them out of the country, albeit with their last-minute consent.
• In Alice Hoffman's Turtle Moon, one of the plot points is that the female lead insisted on taking the kid after her divorce, even though said kid despises living in Florida with her and has his calendar rather spectacularly marked for when he goes to visit his father in New England for the summer - he refers to it as "home".
• In the Backstory of Laurie R. King's Locked Rooms, Mary Russell's mother did this in the wake of the 1906 San Francisco earthquake, although her parents did not divorce.

Live Action TV

• The "divorced dad as a hero" angle is so common that it was parodied in Arrested Development with the Film Within a Show Homeless Dad: "I just want my kids back
  • A line uttered by Tom Jane, who in Hung went on to say "Who do I have to fuck around here to get my kids back?!"
• Happened in an episode of Criminal Minds where Hotchner took back his decision to transfer to Virginia with his wife and son to a less time consuming job. The episode ends with Hotchner coming home and finding it empty.
• Somewhat gender-flipped on Lost: Susan is able to take Walt from Michael partly because she's the mother and partly because she's the one with the money and the good job.
• This is the whole premise behind the 1970s sitcom One Day At A Time: The mom took the daughters and left her husband. Why? Just because she wanted to prove that she could.
• Used in The Shield. At one point, McKay's wife leaves with the kid and he doesn't know where they are. McKay is the hero (well, at least we think he's the hero), so he's still portrayed positively.
• This happened to Ayu in the Deep Love adaptation as a child when her parents divorced her mother took her to her new lover and the father never visited her again even though he had shown her nothing but love when he was allowed to see her.
• A rather unusual perspective on this trope is used in Star Trek: The Next Generation with the Backstory of villain Sela. She explains that she was raised on Romulus where her mother (a time-traveling Tasha Yar) was a prisoner of war. One night her mother tried to flee the planet and was taking the girl with her—but Sela was afraid of the idea of leaving her home and raised the alarm. When her mother was executed, Sela says "Everything in me that was human died... all that remains is Romulan!"
• Two and A Half Men has the antagonist ex-wife use this as a threat from time to time in order to drum up zany sitcom conflict so that the main characters try to find some way to appease her.

Music

• Dropkick Murphys' song "The State of Massachusetts" is about child services doing this to a woman because of her husband who is "violent, malicious, and distant."

Newspaper Comics

• A comic for The Far Side showed an angry female insect telling her husband "I'm leaving you and taking the grubs with me!" Larson was going to have her say "And I'm taking the maggots with me!" but the publisher said that was too gross.

Western Animation

• Marge Simpson did this when Homer bought a gun.
  • She does it again in The Movie.