The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls And The Hate U Give By Angie Thomas

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

When going to school, she thinks to herself, "I don’t have to think about Khalil. I just have to be normal Starr at normal Williamson and have a normal day. That means flipping the switch in my brain so I’m Williamson Starr. Williamson Starr doesn’t use slang… slang makes [her friends] cool, [while] Slang makes her, "hood.” Williamson Starr holds her tongue when people piss her off so nobody will think she’s the, "angry black girl.” (Thomas 71) The fact that Starr has two personalities demonstrates that she cannot express herself when in school and cannot relate to her friends; this proves that her friends do not influence her and disproves Harris’s theory that, "peers trump parents” CITATION. On the other hand, Starr’s parents teach her many life lessons which eventually push her to get justice for Khalil (her friend who had a hairbrush ‘mistaken” for a gun). For example, when Starr and her father are talking about the oppression that African-Americans have experienced over the years, he points out,, "Drugs come from somewhere, and they’re destroying our community,... The [addicts] can’t get jobs unless they’re clean, and they can’t pay for rehab unless they got jobs. When the Khalils get arrested for selling drugs, they either spend most of their life in prison, another billion-dollar industry, or

Rex and Rosemary put Jeannette in a situation where she never had enough food and her house was falling apart; her only escape was school and her siblings. When trying to get out of Welch, Jeannette, Lori, and Brian chip in money from odd jobs into a clandestine piggy bank, "We told Brian about the escape fund, and he pitched in, even though we hadn't included him in our plans because he was only in the seventh grade. He mowed lawns or chopped wood… without looking for thanks or praise, he quietly added his earnings to the pig, which we named Oz” (Walls 224). Even though Jeannette does not involve Brian in the plans to get out of Welch, he still adds money to the fund. This shows that they are willing to help each other and that Brian trusts Lori and Jeannette to use the money in an efficient manner. Jeannette’s situation forces her to have a good relationship with her peers, who are her siblings in this case. This proves Harris’s theory that "peers trump parents” however, it was Jeannette’s situation that did not give her a choice as to who could influence her and whom she could trust. Therefore, her state affected her more than her actual siblings, who she trusted because of