Childhood In Jeannette Walls's The Glass Castle

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The development of a child during childhood has a great impact on their life and how they grow. The way they can achieve this is through the parents’ parenting style and the environment that the child is exposed to. Resilience is a good characteristic for a person to learn and know, but it can also be extreme in some situations. In The Glass Castle, Jeannette and her siblings essentially go through a very tough childhood. Although this tough childhood made them resilient and led them to good careers in life, this led to other developments throughout the course of their lives that impacted their mental health. Jeannette and her siblings should’ve been guided and protected by both parents instead of being let go to find out for themselves. The …show more content…

Because of the constant moving, it was hard for Jeannette to feel a sense of belonging and throughout the memoir, she never really had any friends or long-term friends. “But I was happy in Battle Mountain. We’d been there for nearly a year, and I considered it home—the first real home I could remember” (Walls 81). The family’s stay at Battle Mountain unfortunately did not last and one of the worst decisions was moving to Welch. They moved to Welch to go live with Rex’s mom, the kids’ grandmother. Things were strange there, mostly because of their family members. Erma, their grandmother, would often drink and abuse the children while their parents were gone in Arizona. This led to the kids having to rely on each other more heavily because there wasn’t a safe adult to trust. Many other horrible things happened in Welch. Their uncle would kiss Jeannette more than she liked and they walked in on Erma molesting Brian. Because of this, Jeannette and Lori ended up fighting their grandma because that was what they had to do. This led to even more violence, and the town of Welch was especially known for this. “We fought a lot in Welch. Not just to fend off our enemies, but to fit

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