I found The Glass Castle to be a very eye-opening read for me, since it follows the Wall's kids throughout their struggles and growing up beside them. The walls, the kids never lost hope, which was something that really caught my attention throughout this memoir. Growing up as a Wall kid was a challenge at times, but it made the kids who they are today. This idea challenged the kids to be resilient through all the tough times, however, I do think that there were some negatives to growing up, no matter what they did. A person's childhood can be a huge factor in how they end up in life, which Jeannette Walls defies the odds against. Walls was forced to go through a terrible upbringing. She had an alcoholic father who never had a stable job, who would make the family move once he had some sort of problem with anyone. As with that, she had what they thought was a bipolar mother, who never had a job and only cared for herself at times. With all that said, it was a rough upbringing for Walls, but that never brought her down and she never gave up. In that scenario, a lot of people would just want to call it quits on …show more content…
There are many examples of resilience in childhood and I think a few made Jeannette Walls the person she is today. Early in the memoir, the Wall's kids were getting taught how to swim, Jeannette gets thrown into the water with no prior help learning to swim or just to stay floating. Rex yelled at her, “If you don't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim” (Walls,66). Which I think is huge, no matter how hard the circumstances were that Walls faced, she never gave up. Some kids would try for a few seconds and then give up, while Walls tried and tried to get it. It is possible Rex is trying to teach them to persevere through their problems, but that is just an assumption. Back to that example, it goes along with the mental toughness they need to have in order to get through those