Theme Of Parenting In Everyday Use By Alice Walker

Parenting Struggles Parenting is a key factor in how children make life choices and go about their ways. In “Everyday Use” by Alice Walker, Walker portrays a girl who goes off to school and returns home to her mother and sister a completely changed person. In “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, Tan demonstrates a mother who challenges her daughter into pursuing different roles to ultimately achieve that “child prodigy” standard. Both short stories reflect on the idea of how parenting can change a person to be better or worse. Good parenting is setting guidelines for the child to follow but also creating a stable and positive role in the child’s life. Bad parenting is not caring or letting the child do as they please with no guidelines or consequences. The question arises though of exactly what is good parenting? Both stories pursue two different relationships among mother and daughter and how their different parenting skills affected the child and how they became. To begin, both short stories confine to the idea of a

In “Everyday Use,” the most common symbol is the couple quilts that Dee’s grandmother, mother and aunt hand quilted together. There was clothing, a long star, and pieces of a uniform all representation from Dee’s family members (Schilb and Clifford 319). These quilts are symbolic in that they represent the family heritage that Dee decided to distance herself away from. When Dee asked Mama to take them, Mama asked her to take other ones and gave them to Maggie (Schilb and Clifford 320). Maggie stuck with her heritage and roots and that’s why she ultimately got the quilts at the end. Mama said the feeling to give Maggie the quilts felt like when she’s at church and the spirit of God touches her (Schilb and Clifford 320). She knew to give the quilts to the child who deserves it, the child who was always there with her and the one who knew the importance of those