Parents Behaviour - Essay Example

In The Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls shows how bad some parents are at raising their children. She mainly draws from her own experiences with her mother and father and how badly they treated her. Some of the basic responsibilities, such as cooking food, were not provided for Jeanette and her siblings.

Jeanette’s first experience of bad parenting occurred when she was only three years old. As her parents did not want to make her lunch, Jeanette chose to make hotdogs for herself. However, due to her young age, she burnt herself while making hotdogs. In response to this, Jeanette’s mother decided to take her to a hospital despite the efforts of her father, who did not want her to go. Jeanette enjoyed her time at the hospital, although her father decided to come and take her home even though she needed all the medical treatment she could get.

After a few years, Jeanette’s family moved back to her father’s hometown, West Virginia. For the first time, Jeanette was able to meet her grandmother on her father’s side. She was not a very nice woman though because she often sent Jeanette and her siblings into the cold basement without any dinner. After many confrontations, the family was forced to move out and into a poorer part of town. Something that did not help the family at all was the father’s decision not to find any work. The family was in such a poor state that Jeanette and her siblings had no option but to look for food in the trashcans at their local school.

Even though Jeanette’s family was not in a very good financial situation, this was no excuse to ill-treat their children. Many parents choose to take out their anger on their children because it can be a type of stress relief. But, children are always innocent and thus should be left alone. Jeanette’s parents spanked their kids when they were disobedient, taught them how to use a weapon at a very young age, left them unsupervised for long periods, and usually used foul language in front of their kids. Additionally, their father was also an alcoholic, which did not help their situation at all. All of these unwarranted actions had a long-term effect on the lives of Jeanette and her siblings.

To help curb these issues, Jeanette’s parents should have enlisted some kind of parent counselling help to assist them in the upbringing of their children. Some alternative punishments for their children’s disobedience could be carried out by giving them timeouts or grounding them. This would have taught Jeanette and her siblings to always obey their parents but also would not have overly scarred them physiologically. A lack of parenting skills can have a detrimental effect on the future adult life of a young child. Supervision in such a place as a kitchen is basic common sense and, if a parent had been watching over Jeanette when she was making hotdogs, it would have been likely that she would not have burnt herself. Read More