Bradstreet’s use of metaphor allows her to relate the complex relationships of being a parent to being an author. When the narrator calls her creation her “ ill-formed offspring of [her] feeble brain” she draws parallels between how parents can feel about their children when frustrated (line 1). The narrator refers to her work as a “ rambling brat” to show how difficult it is to accept something she has created (7). The narrator seems to feel this difficulty not only as an author but also as a mother. As a frustrated parent feels the narrator once again uses the metaphor of a child to describe how an author feels when their work does not turn out how they wanted.
On the other side is Eric Bartels who, in his article “My Problem with Her Anger”, describes the hostile nature of the relationship that he has with his wife since the birth of their children However the authors may differ they do touch on similar topics throughout the articles. One common idea among the two viewpoints is that a family requires sacrifice from both partners in order to be successful, but just what that sacrifice entails seems to differ from one perspective to the next. Both authors refer to the feminist movement as an underlying cause for much of the disharmony in their relationships; both cite the notion of co-parenting and equal division of labor as a cause of embitterment and anger on the part of the wife when they realized that it was not the case. While the ideas expressed by the two authors may differ in many ways, there are some ideas that are shared by both parties. That is building and maintaining a family is no easy task and, no matter how hard you may try, you cannot please everyone all the time.
Here, and in many times throughout the book, Didion reaches out to the audience to remind them that she, too, had had those thoughts and knows all too well what it is like to go through the grieving process. This is how she establishes her credibility, and this is how she shares her story of grief. The Claim/Support: In The Year of Magical Thinking, Joan Didion presents her main claim and credibility by stating how everyone goes through this process of grief where they start denying what happened and eventually learn to accept it. However, throughout the
Mother’s Tongue vs. Public Language Richard Rodriguez and Amy Tan, both writers, talk about their experiences with non-American backgrounds living in America. In both of their essays "Aria: Memoir of a Bilingual Childhood" by Rodriguez, and "Mother Tongue" by Tan, are very similar in that they both emphasize the importance of language and describes how it affected their lives. Both Rodriguez and Tan stress the importance of their family's language. Tan expresses two major issues; how language has impacted both her and her mother's lives and the different English's she uses towards her mother and others. Similarly, Rodriguez explains how language has affected him and his family's lives and the transition from Spanish to English.
As all children are expected to be obedient in their home, the rebellion of Jing-mei in her home shows her strong feelings against being lived through vicariously. Instead of a stable environment, the home becomes a battlefield where Jing-mei’s mother is traumatized, “as if she were blowing away like a small brown leaf.” The conflict between Jing-mei and her mother develops from their separate dialects. Because she grew up in America, Jing-mei has flawless English. In contrast, Jing-mei’s mother talks in imperfect English, with tense and verb errors. During the climax of the story, Jing-mei’s mother reverts to her native Chinese as she shouts at her daughter.
Barrientos depicts the hardships and discriminations of the growth of a child coming to America from another country and being forced to speak English and not her native tongue. She knew she was not white like the other children and although she was living the American dream with her family, her parents put her into a position to be English speaking where as they spoke in Spanish to one another but English to the children. As she got older she realized she wanted to be a proud Latina and felt like an outcast from her people because she didn’t speak the language. As her efforts continued she felt discriminated upon by the very people she sought out to teach her. Page 58 she says the registrar called her and her brother, “you people”.
One similarity that the mothers and daughters in the book shared with Tan and her family is that all of the parents had high expectations and goals for their children. Also, when all of the daughters were growing up, there was some sort of family secret kept away from them. Another parallel between the author and the characters in the book is that both of them had lost something that was meaningful to them. The parents, mainly the mothers, pushed their daughters to the highest possible point of their ability to achieve successful lives. The daughters in the stories thought their mothers were very pushy about some things and they did not like it.
Considered by most to be the backbone of America, it is how we socially and culturally indoctrinate our offspring so they are able to become a functional member of society. A lack of a full family is often cited as the reason that children end up as criminals or delinquents. The notion of family being the birthplace of problems is not even something most people could find feasible, which is what makes Barbara Ehrenreicht's essay "Are Families Dangerous?" seem a bit out in left field to most readers. But upon closer inspection and reflection into ones own family life, and the lives of those around them, Ehrenreicht's essay begins to make a lot more sense.
Many first generation parents immigrated here foreseeing a better chance of material success, especially for their children. This however, also comes with a distrust of American family and community values, and this fear leaves the parents in a strange dichotomy: how to raise their child to still hold on to the Japanese cultural values beset in themselves, while raising their child in America, with high hopes and demands for success higher than their own. The children meanwhile must find their own identity between these two countries, and their decision is shaped by a multitude of issues, especially prejudice or racism, and their expectations of such biases. Such discrimination has a direct effect on self esteem, aspirations, and can be a major point of conflict between parent and child, and thus these four issues have a wider effect on the expansion or narrowing of the goals of the second generation child. Thus, the
The solution could be placing the child with a family of a different race. Critics of interracial adoption will say that parents who adopt children of different ethnicities are not capable of caring or educating the child simply because of the cultural differences. The critics opinion has merit in the since that the parents cannot teach the child to be their race but they can provide love and raise them to be responsible adults. In the end we must consider which is more important, being able to find a child a loving family when race is not a factor or waiting for an indefinite time to try to find a family of the same race. If you are thinking about which is more important remember that for every twenty children who are in foster care at least nine of them wait an extended amount of time to be adopted.