Wakatsuki Family Structure

Jeannette is very insecure about her past life of poverty, and although she has now dug herself out of the rut of destitution, her parents’ continued homelessness is always a reminder of

Describe Jeannette’s childhood, specifically her socialization or the process by which she acquired family values, information about social expectations, and survival strategies.

For example, one parent manages the family's finances, while the other supervises the children as in the case of the Wall’s family. However, as one parent develops a drinking problem, the other family members, often times children included, are more likely to find themselves having to take over the other parent’s role and may be performing all the roles as a result. Such as, shopping, household management, finances and so on.

A main reason why there is a division of household sphere is the fact that society affects the way people identify their manhood and womanhood, which creates a family devotion scheme. In Hochschild, The Second Shift identified three types of gender

As a child, Jeannette doesn’t realize that she’s not actually getting what she should be getting. She thinks this is how she should be living. Jeannette doesn’t understand her parents have been neglecting her all this time. Jeannette first noticed that some things were a lot nicer than what she had when she had to be hospitalized because of her fire accident. She was just so amazed about how neat and organized everything was. For instance, “The hospital was clean and shiny. Everything was

Jeanne is riding in the first trip to their new home. The trip is quite wild and disorderly due to Papa’s state of drunkenness. When they reach their destination, the family is in a state of apprehensiveness. They fear the worst possible situation. Luckily, everything remains normal, the people are indifferent to them. Unfortunately, it

What does Jeanne say the camp became as the months turned into years? Explain what she meant by this.

Jeanne goes into detail and states, “I was striving to be Miss America of 1947, he [her father] was wishing I’d be Miss Hiroshima of 1904” (Wakatsuki 164). This alone, shows how Jeanne was being disloyal to her Japanese side because she was siding herself with the “American” side, the side that had previously betrayed her. She wanted to represent the Americans, not the Japanese. At least, that is how her father saw it. Jeanne was disloyal to her Japanese side because she completely abandoned their traditions, in order to “Americanize” herself. She was not presenting herself like the typical Japanese woman; she wore short skirts and smiled a lot. Her father was not proud of the way she was turning out to be, so he brought those points up to her. When Jeanne was running to be queen at her school, her father was very angry. Jeanne describes how her father said that all the males nominated her because she wore short skirts and that she should start to be more modest. At this point, Jeanne’s father Ko must have realized that Jeanne was abandoning her Japanese roots because he brought up a point. He told her “You can be the queen if you start Odori lessons at the Buddhist church” (Wakatsuki 178). Eventually, Jeanne was no longer able to take lessons because she kept smiling during her performances and in Japan it was not socially accepted for people to smile while performing. Jeanne was being disloyal to her Japanese side because she was not doing anything to conserve it. If she truly cared and embraced her Japanese side, she would have at least put in the effort to not smile during her Odori lessons. Jeanne was confused and stuck between two cultures but she ended up being disloyal to one by completely abandoning it and not meeting any of its

Lastly, her family betrayed her by not listening to her side of the story after her sister told lies about her, and they betrayed her when they acted as if they did not care if she moved out of the house. In all of these actions, the family itself and certain members of the family are portrayed as uncaring, unsupportive, disrespectful, conniving, deceitful, and hateful to Sister. Through every action of the family, Sister is treated harshly, and she tries to not let this bother her. Yet, anger and bitterness build up inside of her until she cannot take it anymore. Consequently, it built up so much inside of her that it severely affected Sister so profoundly that she moved away from her home to get away from her family.

Throughout her childhood, Jeannette is faced with instability. Her parents had a very unique style that could be classified as “hands off” parenting. For example, Rose tells Jeanette that “If you don’t want to sink you better learn to swim… That’s one lesson that every parent needs to teach their child” (Walls 137). Instead of growing up in a traditional house, Jeannette and her family constantly moved from town to town. When her mother got bored, or her father got in too many bar fights, Jeannette was forced to pick up her life and move to another small desert town. Due to her nomadic lifestyle, Jeannette refrained from establishing deep friendships amongst her school and

Reconstruction and change are essential for the family system to facilitate the homeostatic process, as explained by the fourth principle of the theory (Minuchin, 1985). It includes family questioning current methods, evaluating and developing potential arrangements. While earlier principles analyse the wholeness of the family system, the fifth principle explains that families can be examined in various segments such as the parent-children subsystem, sibling subsystem and spousal subsystem (Minuchin, 1985). Within the family, relationships between members are formed, and the interactions between each subsystem are regulated by unspoken rules and arrangements, and this is the final principle of family systems theory (Minuchin, 1985). Each subsystem operates independently, and it may encounter changes in the relationship due to various determinants.

Jeanne had a very big family, and the one person who kept them together and in control was Papa. After some of the experiences that the family went through, it made them slowly distance themselves from each other. So here are some key facts to why the family structure disintegrated.

A family may have cooked a pie, and the neighbors each had prepared a side dish to complete a meal. People never were hungry and always had a meal to eat," said Marjorie Smith (qtd. in Smith). Even with the war happening overseas the households constantly made the best of every situation to make sure the children were fed and well taken care of. Before World War II, the woman's role was primarily in the household taking care of the everyday needs of the house and the children, but that changed shortly when women were being moved into the working field.

• The family experiences dysfunctional communication in that, they try to live as roommates rather than mother and children. The home structure allows for communication that is more in line with friends.

The family structure determines where you derive from and provides a sense of who you are. The typical family structure is perceived as a father and a mother, two children, one boy and one girl, and a pet. The typical family description described above is still promoted and expected to be the “dream family.” Author Meyerhoff, “While the nuclear family with Dad, Mom, and offspring happily coexisting beneath one roof-remains the ideal, variations in family structure are plentiful and often successful” (Meyerhoff). Meaning that a lot of families are remarried spouses with prior children and more common in the last decade same sex marriages. So, do these nontraditional families have the same qualities? Personally, I would think so. After