The fifth child
The influence of parents
The parenting style has a big impact on how children develop into adults, and there are important implications for their future success. The fifth child is a book about a family and their problems on the surface, but on a deeper level, it teaches us about the direct consequences of bad parenting.
The first example of this is how the pregnancy affects Harriet differently than the others did. Harriet created a distance between herself and the rest of the family which we can see early in the book, and I quote “at night, David heard her moan, or whimper, but now he did not offer comfort, for it seemed that these days she did not find his arms around her any help” (49). David starts to feel powerless during the pregnancy and it is not only because he cannot seem to calm Harriet, but because he cannot relate to what she is going through.This shows us how it all started, that there is a lack of communication between them which will make it worse because they really need to come together and understand each other.
Ben , the fifth child is described as
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With this description it should be noted that Ben is a negative thing in their family.With his disastrous personality ,Ben’s actions causes massive confusions and he always seems to upset others within the family and also brings forth much discord with other relatives.This we can be see in the book when they ran upstairs to find that Paul had put his hand in to Ben through the cot bars, and Ben had grabbed the hand and pulled hard against the bars, bending the arm deliberately backwards. The two women freed Paul. They did not bother to scold Ben, who was crowing with pleasure and achievement. Paul’s arm was badly sprained.This supports that Ben caused harm to his own