Parenting In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

Nearly 1/2 of the world's population more than 3 billion people live on less than $2.50 a day. Jeannette Walls the quiet, tall red haired girl, daughter of the town drunk, neglected by her own parents and bullied for the way she is. Jeannette Walls quick witted, creative, and kind to everyone. These girls that I explained are the same person but separated by different personalities. In the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, it describes the development of the Walls family and how they are growing up. Despite Jeanette's struggle as a child she has persevered through hard work and self sufficiency, which demonstrates overcoming hard times leads to amazing goals.

In the novel The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, the uncertain future of the Walls’ children was questionable from the start. From a drunk father, to never having a steady home, the author tells of her idiosyncratic youth to describe the bitterness and longing for an ordinary childhood.

Colson Whitehead once said, “Let the broken glass be broken glass, let it splinter into smaller pieces and dust and scatter. Let the cracks between things widen until they are no longer cracks but the new places for things”. In the memoir “The Glass Castle,” author Jeannette Walls faces despair and turmoil as a result of her impoverished and dysfunctional upbringing. As Jeannette grows up, she watches her father Rex fail to reach his full potential and his dream to build a Glass Castle shatter as his alcoholism takes control. Aware of the devastation her father was causing, she begins to slowly lose faith in him but doesn’t fail to escape her destructive household and pursue her dreams of becoming a journalist. Due to her parent’s lack of parenting and being forced to fend for herself, Jeannette developed a sense of responsibility to care for others and make amends to improve the family’s lifestyle. Despite the turbulence and destruction her parents had caused over the years, unlike her father, Jeannette was able to find the strength to overcome obstacles, developing characteristics that ultimately lead her to achieving her dream, thus illustrating that adversity has the power to shape one’s identity.

A parent’s parenting styles are as diverse as the world we live in today. Nowadays, parents only want what is best for their children and their parenting styles plays a crucial role in the development of children which will in the long run, not only effect the child’s childhood years, but later prolong into their adult life as well.

Parenting is not one of the easiest jobs in the world to have; you either are responsible enough to parent or you're not responsible enough.You have to be able to raise a child from birth and teach he/she all the necessary tools to succeed in life. As said in The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Social Work, “Parenting is the process of promoting and supporting the physical, emotional, social, and intellectual development of a child from infancy to adulthood” (245). All parents will raise their children in different ways, whether they are very strict or they’re lenient, others can be easy going and strict depending on the situation and the way they group up will shape them into who they become as adults as shown in The Glass Castle with Jeannette Walls and her parents.

Jeannette Walls is an American writer in journalist who found success in New York City, most notably writing a gossip column for MSNBC in which she details the effects of gossip in politics. She published her memoir, The Glass Castle, in 2005. The book spent 261 weeks on the New York Times Best Seller list. In it, Walls recounts her childhood while growing up in an unstable family with her father and mother, Rex and Rose Mary Walls, her older sister Lori, and her younger brother and sister, Brian and Maureen. Rex and Rose Mary could not settle down and constantly uprooted their family of six to different locations in the southwest region of America. Neither parent could keep a job and struggled to feed and put a roof over their heads. In the novel, Walls views her parents as irresponsible because it rarely seems as though Rex and Rose Mary genuinely want to work and make money to support the family. They thrive off their sense of adventure, as they drive all over the country in a rundown car, looking for their latest shack to pile their family into, usually without running water, heat, or indoor plumbing. Walls will tell the story of her childhood through a series of pivotal moments that ultimately shape her opinion of her parents and lead her to a successful career in New York City.

“I was three years old” (Walls, 9). Jeannette was cooking hot dogs for her self when she was three and her parents weren't watching her. People don't just leave their three year old kid unattended and unsupervised.

“We were always doing the skedaddle, usually in the middle of the night… We moved around like nomads”(Walls 19). Jeannette was never able to settle down. They were always moving, always in a rush and could never really do things like normal families. She ended up not getting a proper education as they never stayed in a town long enough to really learn something just setting her up for failure. Her family was overall just crazy, setting her up to be the same and putting her into the same mess as her parents. She is given one of the hardest child situations to overcome. “Dad was driving and smoking with one hand and holding a brown bottle of beer with the other”. Her parents were terrible examples to grow up with as they had some terrible habits. Dad was an alcoholic and affected the family's life completely as it took over his actions. Her parents were giving her this legacy of having a horrific lifestyle and means of overcoming problems that most people would think she'd end up an alcoholic one day too, but she was able to overcome those odds. She was able to end her family's legacy for her children as she grew up and made better decisions than her parents. Walls’ life completely negates Gladwell’s theory of cultural

The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls about her life and family. Throughout the book, were many episodes where sometimes rules were lacking and episodes where rules were needed during the time when Jeannette Walls was growing up. This strikes up the question, “which is more important to children: freedom or security?” In my opinion based on what I have read, I believe rules would be more important than, freedom.

Jeannette talks about how her parents at times were ignorant at how they were parenting. For example, Jeannette states countless situations in the book where she felt excluded or neglected. There was a situation in the book where she was cooking or preparing herself hotdogs and she got her dress on fire. The flames grew on her rapidly and the injuries became severe; soon after that her mother and father expressed to her that they were little to no concerned about their daughter. In the book it states, “Mom, in an unnaturally calm voice, explained what had happened and asked if we could please have a ride to the hospital. The woman dropped her clothespins and laundry right there in the dirt and, without saying anything, ran for her car” (9-10). This just shows the mother wasn’t the least bit scared for her daughter’s life, she didn’t even panic or react the way a mother should. With that being said, we can even notice that the neighbor was more affected by the situation than that of the mother. This is the earliest stories Jeannette can recall, which is mentioned in her book, and all the stories and memories after that only go to show the neglectful lifestyle she had to endure. It is really a sad reality of this woman’s life. However, Jeannette Walls is now a successful author, and journalist in New York, is one of the few people in this world that has made a successful life from a horrible and neglectful

[Imagine moving from one house to another each month, running from the cops, and always doubting that you are doing the wrong thing.] In the book The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, the Walls family has to face all these conflicts and more. The family of six lives far from the typical American Dream life. Instead they have to deal with unstable parents, money problems, and trust issues. Although this seems like a terrible way to live, the children learn to make the most of it.

Throughout reading The Glass Castle, the idea of Rex’s glass castle came up a fair amount. All through Jeanette’s childhood, her father aspires to create what he calls ‘the glass castle’. He describes it as having “a glass ceiling and thick glass walls and even a glass staircase ”(Walls 25). To Rex, the glass castle was symbolic as a sense of solidarity, I think all he wanted was to stay in one place with his family and to have enough money to avoid the ‘skedaddle’. To Rex, this also was a representation of transparency.

The power struggle between normality and abnormality amid her home is distinct throughout the story. Normality is the state of being “normal” or to have the likeness of the majority while abnormality is the opposite. Jeannette’s parents’ abnormality and their nonconformity holds as the family’s way of life in their home, whereas the children’s struggle to be accepted by their peers and their need for normality oppose that of the parents’. One of the first times the reader can see Jeannette fighting against the abnormality and nonconformity within her home is when the Walls family is living in West Virginia on Little Hobart Street. “I kept looking of other ways to make improvements...A layer of yellow paint, I realized, would completely transform our dingy gray house. It would look, at least on the outside, almost like the houses other people lived in” (Jeannette 156). Rex had brought home yellow paint along with a few paint brushes, and Jeannette thought of the idea of painting their home with it. No one in her family wanted to help her, so by herself she painted the deck yellow. Unfortunately, the paint job was never finished, and it only made the house look worse and family stand out more, rather than blending them in with everyone else like Jeannette had planned. Jeannette’s need for normality can be felt by the reader, and how hard she is working for it with little

Throughout the Glass Castle, Jeanette Walls reveals every intricacy of her childhood. She spares little to no element from the judgment of the reader, especially the shortcomings of her father. Rex Walls is a highly intelligent man. At first, he is continually encouraging himself and his children to dream. He believes in himself and aspires to be better than he is; which you can tell by the contraptions he continues to spend time building in order to get rich. His major shortfall is his dependence on alcohol. This dependence leads to him lose jobs and subsequently their home, eventually forcing them to move in with his parents. After moving his family to his hometown, Rex is driven to drink more and new revelations have a major impact on his family. Ultimately, his past abuse and troubled childhood leads him into alcoholism, making him incapable of upholding his ideals of autonomy. Despite his ideals of masculinity and fatherhood, he always comes up short due to his alcoholism, which conversely drives him deeper into depression and more drinking.

In her memoir The Glass Castle, author Jeannette Walls uses situations involving fire for the purpose of illustrating the fundamental difference between her maturing self and her parents; Jeannette, unlike her parents, is able to understand the consequences of her actions, which contributes to her atypical relationship with her parents in comparison to society's expectations for the child-parent relationship. The story begins with three-year-old Jeannette suffering from severe burns after attempting to cook a hot dog for herself. After having called to her mother for help, she noted the peculiarity of her mother's reaction: "Mom, in an unnaturally calm voice, explained what had happened..." (9). At the young age of three, Jeannette had begun to question her mother's behavior, as evidenced by her description of her mother's voice as being "unnaturally calm."