Indeed, the novel's portrait of adulthood and parents is far from flattering. And parents come in for an even more frank treatment. If the ideal parent is a teacher, a provider, and, most importantly, a protector, the real parent can clearly fail at any of these roles, can betray his own child just as the Government betrays Stephen's subcommittee by publishing its own version of the chid-care handbook. Stephen fails in the role of Kate's protector. Especially relevant in Stephen's case is the relationship between parents and time.
Parents are in some ways, then, the enemies of time, a foe more formidable than they.
For Stephen this parental dilemma is turned on its head. Stephen and Charles would claim that the child may be in time, but not of it. Kate the child is gone, as her childhood will be someday. Stephen learns this awful truth the hard way - through the painful endurance of time after her disappearance. Yet time's other face eventually reveals itself to him.