Rebellion In Into The Wild

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Growth When we were children what our parents would say was God’s word. There was no telling them they were wrong and we obeyed their orders. Children simply do not see flaws in their parents. However, as we grow into young adults we begin to rebel. We see rebellion as a way to become independent. The rite of passage all young adults take in re-establishing themselves apart from their parents and making their own identity is a difficult process. The transition from an obedient child into an independent adult is a stage that causes problems for many families. Christopher Johnson McCandless, from the fiction novel Into The Wild, and his family had a difficult time with this transition. Their family took extreme action which unfortunately caused the death of twenty two year old Chris McCandless. When…show more content…
by Poppy Smith, Peggy Altig, a family counselor, summarizes this familiar struggle, "Learning to be a separate person is the main task of young adulthood, becoming equal rather than being under the parent's dominance." These words would have been extremely useful for Christopher McCandless and his parents to ease the though this difficult process. Billie and Walt McCandless should have allowed Christopher to make his own decisions and go through the process of becoming an adult. If Chris would have had the space to do as he liked being a twenty two year old young adult, his and his parents relationship would have been existent and Chris would not have been driven into the wild. Their action were overly extreme. Although this transaction from an obedient teen into an independent adult causes problems for many families it has to be done as Poppy Smith in How Can I Let My Children Go states, “ Parental control, so necessary at certain stages of our child's development, can be a hard habit to break, but it must be done. Giving our children-turned-young-adults freedom to make their own decisions is tough for many of
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