Character Analysis
Paulsen only mentions his parents a few times in the early chapters, and none of what he says sounds good. Reading between the lines, we see a progression in which his relationship with them grows worse and worse.
When Paulsen was 7, he got his first dog when he and his mother visited a market. At that point, though Paulsen says "I almost never saw [my parents], and when I did they were usually not sober" (2.23), we know that they're at least a little bit involved in his life. At the market, for instance, his mother "had seen the man reach for me and had come over like a tigress, ready to attack him, only to find I would not let the puppy go" (2.8).
By the time Paulsen was 12, the situation with his parents had taken a turn for the worse. They were both drinking heavily and neglecting him terribly.
Much of my childhood I was alone. Family troubles—my parents were drunks—combined with a devastating shyness and a complete lack of social skills to ensure a life of solitude. (3.1)
In the chapter with Dirk, he writes that "with the drinking at home and the difficulties it caused with my parents I couldn't live in the house" (4.1). He also tells us that he started sleeping in the basement of their apartment building. His parents' drinking got so bad that they never left him food or bought him clothes or school supplies. He had to hold down several jobs after school just to have enough to eat.
Throughout the rest of the book, which covers Paulsen's adult life, we don't hear anything about his parents at all. That omission is worth a thousand pages.