Unparenting In The Glass Castle By Jeannette Walls

While unparenting assumably means neglect, it actually is a parenting style, giving children the right to have numerous freedoms. Unparenting is a form of parenting involving partial parental detachment from the offspring (YourDictionary.com). This often includes a lack of rules or parental guidance. Unparenting has no strict rules or guidelines, leading to countless different forms of the word. However, they are all united by one common category: Independence.
Unparenting is not frequently used and is in the bottom twenty percent of words in the American language. The division of unparenting can help lead to a better understanding of its definition. The Greek root -un translates to “not”, and parenting is defined as “ the raising of a child by its parents”

parenting is a terrible invention. It hasn’t improved the lives of children and parents, and in some ways it’s arguably made them worse. For middle-class parents, trying to shape their children into worthy adults becomes the source of endless anxiety and guilt coupled with frustration. And for their children, parenting leads to an oppressive cloud of hovering expectations,” while to others, parenting is highly important. In the memoir, The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, Rose Mary and Rex Walls have a unique way of parenting their children. They let their children do what they want when they want, allowing them to learn life lessons on their own. When their daughter, Jeannette, is cooking hot dogs, she lights herself on fire. By lighting herself on fire, she learns fire is dangerous, and she needs to be careful when dealing with fire. According to James Russell Lowell, “One thorn of experience is worth a whole wilderness of warning,” and this is demonstrated through unparenting. No matter how much warning Jeannette’s parents give her, the experience of being burned was worth