Baka-Updates Manga - Viewing Topic - Deadbeat Parents (Non Abusive)

Hmm, I'm pretty sure the mother of the protagonist in H is deadbeat without being abusive, because while she feeds and clothes and loves her daughter, she's just too busy working and gives her daughter money as compensation for not being around (like, 'buy yourself your own food - I have to work!') which, of course, leads her daughter down the VERY bad path of spending that money on hosts. *headdesk*

As for a deadbeat Dad who adores his kid but is still too caught up in mourning his wife's death to be around for that kid, check out Komatta. The father literally runs off to Africa immediately after his wife dies (he's an international photographer, but it's obvious he's just using his career as an excuse to escape). That leaves the child with the grandmother, who also ends up dying a few years later - which ends up in the kid going to boarding school while the father only visits intermittently. Please note that this is not THE main plot of the manga, which is an episodic school dramedy, but it's one of the major subplots. You can pretty much ignore the BL tag - it's still just a friendship between the boys even after 12 volumes, so I'm not sure it's ever going to be 'real' BL! (But it's BL enough for those of us that want to see the friendship as a romance, I guess?)

In fact, the mangaka of Komatta seems to do deadbeat-but-loving parents quite regularly - in Super Lovers, for example, the divorced biological mother of the protagonist is a successful writer who nonetheless is just so weird that she counts as a deadbeat parent; it's a miracle she can even look after herself. SL is more textually shounen-ai, though; don't know if you'd like that.

Another mourning father unable to raise his kids is the missing father of the twins in Love So Life, who are left in the care of a newsreading relative who is too busy to look after them himself, and has to hire an underage girl to watch over them as a babysitter. It's the blossoming romance between the babysitter and the newsreader that's the main plot, but every so often, the point of the twins' absolutely incompetent (but not outright abusive) father is raised.

The parents of all the main characters in Bara no Tameni are so deadbeat as to be practically unbelievable - as are the parents (particularly the father of, like, 100000000 kids - yes, he slept around THAT much) in Nanahikari. The first is a shoujo manga but the latter is BL. I strongly recommend the latter, though, because the gay content isn't hardcore, and the manga (to me, at least) is more about the father's bizarre personal history and his deadbeatness than it is about anything else. In fact, I don't think there's a single parent in that manga who isn't deadbeat... o_o;

I hope you found some material here!