Parenting In The Glass Castle

For a parent, one of the biggest concerns they have for their children is making sure they are ready for their future, whether it would be for college or the working world. The skills that parents teach their children at a young age continue to help them grow throughout their life. However, as young children, they do not need to know how to be capable of everything, but exposing them and helping them practice basic essential skills will help them grow up to be successful adults. In order for parents to have their children ready to perform successfully in college and in the working world, they need to distribute a fair amount of attention and responsibility to them. Although, parents take different paths in which ways they decide to raise their …show more content…
At just thirteen years old she drew up a budgeting system and was able to spend three dollars and fifty cents a day on food for them, not until her father asked for money to feed his addiction, losing two days’ worth of food. He later came around and asked for twenty-five more for gas money, and Walls gave it up after he told her to let him worry about the food and the bills (209-210). Not only do Walls’ parents exhibit an extreme hands-off attitude of the upbringing of their kids, but at some points they have taken it attitudes too far. Her parents not only let them mainly take care of their selves because they want them to mature faster but that their parents cannot even take care of themselves. Walls’ parents were trapped in their own thoughts and ideas of themselves and the world around them. Similar to philosophers Plato’s ideas in “The Allegory of the Cave”, her parents were trapped in their own cave, and this caused Walls and her siblings to look after themselves. In Plato’s “The Allegory of the Cave” he describes the cave as being an imprisonment ,” human beings living in an underground, cavelike dwelling…fixed in the same place…able to see only in front of them” (3). Although they are not actually stuck in a cave, and the cave being a metaphor, Walls’ parent’s “caves” are an imprisonment to not wanting to attain jobs, so they can have money to provide for their family. In The Glass Castle Walls’ mother, Rose Mary emphasizes that after she returned from renewing her teaching certificate she “intended to quite her teaching job and devote herself to art” (218). Leaving her telling her children that they can earn their own money (218). Walls’ father was in his own cave