Relationship within The Virgin Suicides - Essay Example

When it comes to teenagers, and especially teenage girls, parenting becomes all the more daunting. Teenage girls, if handled correctly, grow up into conscientious women who can look after their families responsibly. On the other hand, if they are mishandled, they can create deteriorating circumstances for themselves and for the whole family. Teenage pregnancies and teenage suicides are becoming some of the leading social problems of our societies. Such tribulations arise due to flawed relationships that exist between the parents and their teenage daughters.

Some parents attempt to make their daughters blissful by putting off stricter boundaries from them, and encouraging them or not getting bothered when they interact with the opposite sex. This gives girls a hidden support from their parents, and they get indulged in teenage sexual relationships, which have disastrous consequences later on. Parents disregard the fact that, perhaps, their daughters need love and affection from their side instead of sheer leniency. The thesis statement of this paper is that: there is a difference between parents’ perception of their daughters’ emotional demands and teenage girls’ expectations from their parents. . The suicides attempted by five teenage girls bring the catastrophic ending to the family.

The novel shows how parents try to please their girls by allowing them to interact with the opposite sex without any restriction, and how this leniency brings disaster to the whole family. The parents in the novel, like most of the parents of our society, ignored the fact that their teenage daughters wanted their love and warmth of affection. They needed care from their parents instead of care from an outsider. The parent-adolescent relationship gets a twist in this aspect. Smetana et al. (201) concluded from their research that, “Greater trust, perceived obligations to disclose, and, for personal issues, more parental acceptance and psychological control predicted more disclosure and less secrecy.

” This makes one believe that when parents show trust in their adolescents’ issues, the latter feel more obligated to disclose their feelings to their parents. However, parents need to understand in what direction their trust and psychological control go. Overestimation of teenage girls’ disclosure of issues can inspire mothers to let go of their control, thus making them more lenient toward their daughters. This leniency, at times, proves to be catastrophic, like when mothers feel no botheration in letting their teenage daughters keep relations with boys, as shown in The Virgin Suicides.

Children disclosure of issues, according to Smenata et al. (201), is what talks about children’s expectation from their parents that the latter will act in their favor. The reaction from the parents’ side can have many facets. How they cope with their teenage girls’ disclosure depends upon the parents’ intellect and experience. If they understand that their daughters