Role Model In Li-Young Lee's The Gift

The ideal room for a teenager is one that has walls cluttered with posters or quotes of famous men and women. Every morning a teen wakes up and is surrounded by images of those that he or she admires and goes to sleep with the idol like figures watching over him or her. Everyone has a role model that they look up to whether it be a friend, a colleague, a stranger, or a super star. One cannot help but look at the life of another and attempt to model one’s own life after the other. Following someone else is how humans have survived, one sees what works and begins to do the same. However, many follow and model their lives after the wrong people or the wrong crowd, and because of this it is essential that parents or guardians take up the form of

Whitelock one recognizes the need for a child to admire his or her parent. A parental role model allows a child to learn, understand, and succeed. From a young age children are taught how to handle their emotions, either by teaching themselves or learning from an adult. In Li-Young Lee’s poem “The Gift” the speaker learns how to deal with his emotion from his father’s gentle example. The father distracts the speaker from “the iron sliver [he] thought [he]’d die from” by telling him a story (Lee 5). Distracting a child from his emotions is a common technique that parents use. Elizabeth Shewark and Alysia Blandon found from their research on Children’s Emotion Regulation that using forms of

In fact, many children grow up and become adults not fully knowing many things, but there are adults who do possess knowledge and understanding and it is their responsibility to pass their insight to others, especially their children. In the poem “My Father is a Simple Man” poet Luis Omar Salinas shows where true understanding comes from and how it can be passed on. The poem opens up with a common scene of an elderly father and an adult son walking into town together. One can easily assume that the son is an educated man because the son says, “We argue about the price / of pomegranates. I convince / him it is the fruit of scholars” (Salinas 5-6). However, even though the father sees his son’s point on pomegranates he comes back with the philosophical thought of the longevity and benefits of oranges which leads him to conclude that they are the better fruit. One can assume that the son has spent most of his life obtaining knowledge and forming ideas of his own, but through his walk with his father all the knowledge that he thought he had is proven false through his father’s wise words.. As the son walks with his father he begins to see that all he really needed to learn and understand were the simple facts in life and he would become the great man that he had hoped to be. Perhaps the son understood his father too late which is a sad reality that happens often. Shelia Suess Kennedy wrote an article