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Summary Of The Wall By Jeannette Walls

655 Words3 Pages

Rex and Rose Mary’s persistent laissez-faire attitude towards the children’s basic needs for safety and age-appropriate expectations are evident in stories of Jeanette’s early childhood. When Jeannette was three years old, she badly burned herself when she was making herself hotdogs to eat. Upon being asked by a nurse why she was cooking unsupervised, Jeannette replied “Mom says I’m mature and lets me cook for myself a lot”. (Walls 18). Already, at the ripe age of just three years old, Jeanette knew that if she wanted to eat, she had better grow up quick and become independent and able to care and cook for herself. Growing up, the Walls children learned to thrive off of their neglect and became tough and resilient. This was proven even further when Rex, attempting to teach Jeannette how to swim, nearly let her drown in the water before rescuing her at the last moment and telling her “If you don’t want to sink you better figure out how to swim” (Walls 66). This event further proves that Rex …show more content…

Rose Mary had attended college for a brief time to pursue an art career, she never finished her degree due to her pregnancy and was forced to drop out in order to care for her children. Rex never attended a college or university of any sort. Due to this, neither parent could hold a professional job or sustain a career of any type. The Wall’s situation in this area was and is very common amongst families living in poverty. In a study by the United States Census Bureau, it was discovered that in 8/10 families living in poverty, neither parent holds a college degree, GED, or high school diploma (Farrigan). Most families in this situation work odd jobs, such as Rex did, or do not work at all and are on welfare. While the family refused to take government handouts or accept help from any of their family members, Rose Mary never held a job outside of a brief teaching position or as an

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The books, Salvage the Bones by Jesmyn Ward, and The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, are exemplary models of an American family in poverty, and their journey and struggle to survive. They had to live off of what they had and they thought their lifestyles were normal until realizing others have it easier. Each of these families used different strategies in order to survive their insolvent circumstances and hardships. In Salvage the Bones, Esch and her family kept moving and giving each other strength to survive, during a devastating storm in which left them homeless. In The Glass Castle, even though the Walls family was in poverty and didn’t have a permanent home and were always moving.

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Children have grown up alongside their parents for generations, and humans have accepted the fact that parents greatly shape the growth of children. The memoir The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls and the novel The Hate U Give by Angie Thomas both explore a young girl’s journey through adolescence. Throughout each novel, influences such as parents and peers drive the development of Starr in The Hate U Give and Jeannette in The Glass Castle. However, in 1998 Malcolm Gladwell (a writer for The New Yorker) wrote and article about Judith Harris who proposed a theory that “peers trump parents” (Gladwell PAGE) as influences on children. Other parts of this theory were that genes of parents matter more than actual parenting style, and that kids try

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Rex overestimates his daughter's growth repeatedly, saying “It was like that time I threw you into the sulfur spring to teach you to swim,... You might have been convinced you were going to drown, but I knew you’d do just fine.” (Walls, 213). Rex intends to intensify Jeanette’s collective age with rapidity. Both of Walls’s parent’s intentions and personalities elevated the mental age of their children, forcing them to come-of-age to accommodate their

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A Struggling Family With Successful Futures Bill Gates once said, “If you're born poor, it's not your mistake. But if you die poor its your mistake.” In the novel The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls the Walls children learn many things that lead them to a successful future. This novel is about a very poor family that includes Rex, and Rosemary the father and mother of Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen Walls. Rex and Rosemary are very irresponsible and don't like having jobs. Because of this they become very poor either because their parents don't like their job so they quit or they get fired.

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The Permissive Parents The parenting paradigm best exemplified to Rex and Rosemary Walls in The Glass Castle Jeanette Walls is the permissive parenting paradigm. The parents of Jeanette are more reactive than demanding to the children (Cherry, “The Four Styles of Parenting”). Jeanette at one point expressed, “I loved the desert, too… we’d catch scorpions and snakes and horny toads. We’d search for gold, and when we couldn’t find it, we’d collect other valuable rocks…” (21).

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“If you don 't want to sink, you better figure out how to swim” (41). Although Rex Walls was not always an admirable father and role model, he did make an essential point while teaching his daughter, Jeannette, how to swim. In life, not everything comes without resistance. As Jeannette Walls describes throughout her life story, sometimes people are forced to face hardships that make them question their whole life. However, as seen in her book, it is important to learn to take those hardships and use them to shape one’s future for the better.

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Homelessness in The Glass Castle In the 1960s, according to American Civil Liberties Union, 20% of the United States population were homeless, and shunned from the rest of society because of stereotypes. The Glass Castle is a memoir written by Jeannette Walls, to tell the story of her life growing up as a homeless child with an alcoholic father and an artistic mother. Her memoir is a story about relationships, and how the outside world influences them. In The Glass Castle, by Jeannette Walls, homeless people are marginalized as uneducated, reckless and mentally unstable.

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In school students do not care about writing as much as they used to. If they would work harder in school, their grades would be higher and more colleges would want them. In Esther Cepeda 's research, she managed to prove that students test scores are going down. That is because they do not work as hard as they used to.

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The Walls kids were raised figuring out how to be free. As a result of their alcoholic father, Rex they didn't have advantages that most other children have. The Walls children didn't have two star role models in their lives to help them blossom, however Rex did do what he could to make their life more radiant although more times than others he failed. For example, Rex would show up to church drunk, and degrade the people’s religion all while making the kids and his wife Rose feel embarrassed and ashamed. I'm sure he didn't mean to have them feel that way

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To begin, the lack of financial stability in the Walls family has always been problematic, however as the mother of her children, Rose Mary never contributed much to the family income due to her stubbornness and free-spirited nature. A prime example of Rose Mary not providing for her family is a constant lack of food in the house. The children’s hunger is apparent when Jeannette says, “We did eat less. Once we lost our credit at the commissary, we quickly ran out of food. Sometimes Dad’s odd jobs would come through, or he’d win some money gambling, and we’d eat for a few days.

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I was homeless. Everything - from my prestigious awards to my mattress all the way to the trash from beside my toilet- was piled right on top of one another. Teddy bears, pictures, and even abstract memories seemed to have a haunting presence as I tried to comprehend what was happening. My dad patiently tried to help me understand how we had got to a point of such penetrating financial instability that the bank had revoked our house. Homelessness, while seemingly obvious, means different things to different people.

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Poverty and Mental Health Jeannette Walls’ memoir, The Glass Castle, demonstrates the struggles of mental health issues that generate from poverty through her family’s journeys, both mentally and physically. Jeannette Walls displays how poverty can affect an entire family’s life through her use of realism, in-depth descriptions, and imagery in her memoir, The Glass Castle. The Glass Castle focuses on the tie between mental health issues and poverty through the theme of the lasting effects of poverty. Poverty in Jeannette’s younger years is the cause of the majority of her anxiety, depression, and other mental health issues. The Walls family’s period of time in Phoenix contributed to Jeannette’s mental health issues.

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This is first shown when Rose Mary (the matriarch of the Walls family) tells a three-year-old Jeannette to cook hot dogs for herself. Rose Mary was in another room painting and singing while toddler-Jeannette was using the stove. This led to Jeannette being severely burned. This type of injury could be avoided if her mother would have just made her the food or at least supervised. Another instance of parental neglect in the memoir

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This normally would be a very fun activity, but Jeannette does not know how to swim or even float. Naturally, Rex throws her into the deep pool and keeps pushing her back and under the water, making her fear for her safety (Walls 66). This action shows that Rex Walls put no thought into his daughter's safety. This behavior is considered dangerous because his daughter was not properly prepared or trained to be put in such a deep pool without help from her parents. Rex was used to this type of behavior from his alcoholic mind so he did not think much of it, even though he was endangering his daughter.

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The joy of learning is what unified the Walls family and is the source of the children’s most endearing memories. They would read together and bond over learning. Jeannette recounts her happier moments “after dinner, the whole family was stretched out on the benches and the floor of the depot and read with the dictionary in the middle of the room so we could look up words we didn’t know. (Walls 56-57) The Walls not only believed in a growth mindset; sharing knowledge was in fact how Rex and Rose Mary best expressed their genuine love and affection towards their children.

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