The book is about a young boy called Max who is unruly, and at the opening of the book, he is running around the house wearing a wolf-suit. He is carrying a large hammer, runs around making mischief, and later chases the dog around with a fork. The mother shouts at him, telling him he is a “WILD THING,” and max tells her that “I’LL EAT YOU UP.” Due to this, the mother tells Max to go to bed without eating dinner. The mother is unsympathetic and not present. Hence the parenting philosophy described in the story is an uninvolved parenting style.
Max, who goes to bed hungry, rages in his bedroom, but soon trees surround him, and the walls disappear. He then walks around the forest and crosses the ocean to “where the strange things are.” Wild things then appear, which have sharp teeth and are threatening, but Max manages to dominate and confront them. He later becomes their king and commands them to start a rampage, and he joins them. Max later commands them to stop and sends them to sleep without eating. All along, Max is imagining and is trying to get away from reality and from his unbothered mother.
Max gets lonely and needs to go back to where he is “cared for” and finds food in his room that his mother left, which is still hot. This shows that although the mother was unavailable, she still cared for his son. The mother was depressed, hence the unavailability to her son, who needed to be understood and his concerns met. By creating another world in his head and meeting wild things where he was the king, Max was trying to overcome and tame the troubles of having an emotionally unavailable mother. While also coming to terms with the fact that his mother did not understand him at all.