Points From A Glass Castle

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The Positives of Negligent Parenting; Points from The Glass Castle The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is memoir that demonstrates how, despite experiencing a terrible childhood, there is hope for the future. The Walls children survived an alcoholic father, a detached mother, jumping from town to town, and starvation; amongst a multitude of many other traumatizing life events. Regardless of the long list of flaws Jeannette’s parents had, they also had a few compensatory qualities that helped their children later in life: self-sufficiency, the ability to learn from mistakes, being well educated, and knowing the control to change things was within them. From early on Jeannette had to be self-sufficient. As a three years old toddler, she boiled her own hotdogs. She grew up trying to safety pin torn shoe soles together and invent her own braces to fix her bucked teeth. Even her fun activities were from a source of imagination: “When Dad wasn’t there we invented our own games” (Walls 54). From family time games to feeding empty stomachs, the Walls children were forced into situations to make them rely on themselves. Although the situations the children were forced into to that enabled them to be self-sufficient were less than ideal-such as when Jeannette suffered severe burns from cooking her own food at such a young age-without those dire moments she may have grown up to be more like her sister, Maureen. Their lifestyle did not just teach them to be self-sufficient; it taught them to learn from their mistakes and those of others. Jeannette’s mother seemed very detached from her children. It often seemed they learned from their mistakes because she simply didn’t care enough to help them. Her beliefs were evident when it was noted, “She felt it was good for kids to do what they wanted because they learned a lot from their mistakes. Mom was not one of those fussy

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