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Effects of child abuse on child development
The negative effects of abuse on children
The negative effects of abuse on children
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The author of the story “Strays”, Mark Richard, starts off with the main characters, the two brothers, lying in their beds listening to the sound of stray dogs beneath the floorboards, scratching their flee infested backs, and licking the water leaking from the pipes. The mother of the children runs off into the cornfields while the father chases after her. The father’s brother, Uncle Trash, comes to babysit the boys and ends up scamming the boys out of everything they own. The parents still haven not returned, and when Uncle Trash returns after a night of heavy drinking the boys notice he was beaten up and his truck is gone. Later in the story while the adults are out of the house, the two brothers caught one of the stray dogs and sprayed …show more content…
In the beginning, the mother leaves the house and runs off into the cornfields near the house. The father asks his brother to babysit the children while he runs after his wife. Uncle Trash is the father’s brother; he comes to watch the boys while the father runs after the wife. While both parents are gone, the children are not exactly alone. Uncle Trash is rarely with the boys throughout the story, he is always leaving to go to the bar and gamble. This way in the story, the boys are always alone and can do whatever they want. This freedom often leads to bad experiences when left in the hands of children. The boys in the story did not get into trouble till the end of the story, in the mean time they dug holes in the yard and played with toy metal cars until the uncle returned sometimes days later. Unsupervised children can be very dangerous; they can hurt themselves or others. “Uncle Trash said the man who won the card game went ahead and beat up Uncle Trash on purpose anyway”. For the time being Uncle Trash is their role model. He is clearly a bad role model judging from this line in the story. This relates to the reality side of things, where children grow up with parents who are just like Uncle Trash. The author tries relating scenarios from the story to life to get the audience to understand the society they live in. Another aspect of unsupervised children would be abandonment, which the boys …show more content…
When the parents run off without them and never come back for a long time, and when Uncle Trash scams the boys out of everything they own and takes off for days at a time, then sells their belongings and buys cigars and alcohol with the money he made. Growing up being forgotten about can have serious, long lasting effects on children. The author tries to portray the boys as being forgotten so the audience reading will understand that it is a serious issue. “During the knocking down nobody notices our mother. She is a flatfooted running rustle through the corn all burned up by the summer sun”. At the end of the story the mother finally returns to see her house burned down by the sons she left in the hands of their drunken
The Bragg family grew up with virtually nothing. The father left the family a number of times, offering no financial assistance and stealing whatever he could before he left. When he was there, he was usually drunk and physically abusive to the mother. He rarely went after the children, but when he did the mother was always there to offer protection. Mr. Bragg's mother's life consisted of working herself to exhaustion and using whatever money she had on the children.
It was times throughout the book the reader would be unsure if the children would even make it. For example, “Lori was lurching around the living room, her eyebrows and bangs all singed off…she had blisters the length of her thighs”(178).Both Lori and Jeannette caught fire trying to do what a parent is supposed to do for their child. Jeannette caught fire at the age of three trying to make hotdogs because her mother did not cook for her leaving Jeannette to spend weeks hospitalized. She was burnt so bad she had to get a skin graft, the doctors even said she was lucky to be alive. The children never had a stable home. They were very nomadic and a child should be brought up to have one stable home. No child should remember their childhood constantly moving. This even led to Maureen not knowing where she come from because all she can remember is her moving. The children had to explain to her why she looked so different is because where she was born. They told Maureen “she was blond because she’d been born in a state where so much gold have been mined, and she had blue eyes the color of the
...e on her part. Throughout the story, the Mother is portrayed as the dominant figure, which resembled the amount of say that the father and children had on matters. Together, the Father, James, and David strived to maintain equality by helping with the chickens and taking care of Scott; however, despite the effort that they had put in, the Mother refused to be persuaded that Scott was of any value and therefore she felt that selling him would be most beneficial. The Mother’s persona is unsympathetic as she lacks respect and a heart towards her family members. Since the Mother never showed equality, her character had unraveled into the creation of a negative atmosphere in which her family is now cemented in. For the Father, David and James, it is only now the memories of Scott that will hold their bond together.
There are many stories shared in this book about the boys and their crimes. Most of the boys have physical abuse, drug addictions, gang affiliations or a combination of these in their background. Several of them have been bounced around to their grandparents, aunts and uncles or even foster care.
The mother is a selfish and stubborn woman. Raised a certain way and never falters from it. She neglects help, oppresses education and persuades people to be what she wants or she will cut them out of her life completely. Her own morals out-weight every other family member’s wants and choices. Her influence and discipline brought every member of the family’s future to serious-danger to care to her wants. She is everything a good mother isn’t and is blind with her own morals. Her stubbornness towards change and education caused the families state of desperation. The realization shown through the story is the family would be better off without a mother to anchor them down.
In the beginning of the story the narrator and his boys considered themselves to be bad boys because of what they did, what people thought they were, and what they wore. To them, it was cool to be dangerous and bad. The people who wasn’t, were irrelevant. The narrator and his boys “wore torn-up leather jackets, slouched around with toothpicks in our mouths, sniffed glue and ether and what somebody claimed was cocaine” (par.1). Also they “struck elaborate poses to show that we didn’t give a shit about anything” (par. 1). The narrator looked forward to the nightlife and the bad stereotypes along with that, including: drinking, drug use, sex, violence, etc…. even though the narrator was only 19 years of age. The three of them would go uptown to Greasy Lake regularly, to party a hang out with others. Until one night the narrator and his boys encountered a rude awakening at Greasy Lake.
Through the view of 16 year old protagonist Billy, the reader is shown his struggles of being a homeless teen. Billy was in a state of homelessness because he ran away from "Nowheresville", and from his abusive father. This is proven on page 10, where in Billy's point of view it states, "The wind and rain hits you in the face with the force of a father's punch..." which implies that Billy knows what the force of a father's punch feels like. His abusive father is one of the main causes for Billy being homeless, and why Billy had hitched a train to Bendarat to start a new life.
Children living in this type of environment may feel anger, shame, and sadness. They are forced to take on adult roles much earlier because their parents are irresponsible. For instance it shows this in The Glass Castle because the children are forced to make their own meals and fend for themselves because Rex is too busy drinking and Rose Mary is careless (Walls). Alcoholism takes away children’s childhood by forcing them to take on adult roles. Another example of this is when Billy Deel is forced to take care of himself while his father is passed out and constantly drinking, “Billy had a lot of unsupervised time on his hands” (Walls 82). Billy was greatly affected by his father’s alcohol abuse his personality didn’t maturely develop like other children. This is shown when he sexually assaults Jeanette and doesn’t see anything wrong with it, he yells on page 87 “Guess what? I raped you!” (Walls). This statement proves that parents make a huge impact on children, and when children don’t have that, they suffer. Alcohol abuse is not an individual problem, it affects everyone surrounding that person. It isn’t fair for children to be raised in that environment and government should take greater action to protect the children’s safety by removing them from homes like
This story makes the reader wonder, why must parents do this to their children, what kinds of motifs do they have for essentially ruining their child’s life. I believe
In Karen Russell’s short story St. Lucy’s Home for Girls Raised by Wolves, Karen uses evidence to show whether or not Claudette has conformed to humanity.
Most of us can easily picture a typical child's party, loud and hyper boys running about, noise and fun and screaming kids and chaos, but this party seems to be viewed differently by the mother. It is a more serious and quiet event. She sees the boys as "short men" gathering in the living room, not as children having fun. The children seems subdued to us, with "hands in pockets". It is almost as if they are waiting, as the readers are, for something of imp...
Narrated by the mother of two daughters, the story opens with an examination of one daughter's favoring of appearances over substance, and the effect this has on her relatives. The mother and her younger daughter, Maggie, live in an impoverished rural area. They anticipate the arrival of the elder daughter, Dee, who left home for college and is bringing her new husband with her for a visit. The mother recalls how, as a child, Dee hated the house in which she was raised. It was destroyed in a fire, and as it was burning, Dee "(stood) off under the sweet gum tree... a look of concentration on her face", tempting her mother to ask, "'why don't you do a dance around the ashes?'" (Walker 91) She expects Dee will hate their current house, also. The small, three-room house sits in a pasture, with "no real windows, just some holes cut in the sides" (Walker 92), and although, as Dee asserts, they "choose to live" in such a place, Dee keeps her promise to visit them (Walker 92). Her distaste for her origins is felt by her mother and Maggie, who, in anticipation of Dee's arrival, internalize her attitudes. They feel to some extent their own unworthiness. The mother envisions a reunion in which her educated, urbane daughter would be proud of her. In reality, she describes her...
The children couldn’t accept what they thought was so horrible. There was a lot of ignorance and carelessness portrayed throughout this short story. The theme of ungratefulness was revealed in this story; The author depicted how disrespecting someone can inturn feed you with information you may wish you never knew and how someone can do one wrong thing and it immediately erases all the good things a person did throughout their
The mother in the story a nameless figure with very little description and almost no voice what so ever. She is a bitter reminder of how society views some woman. They are seen as a permanent stature of a home but not necessarily a figure in society. The kids both very loud and annoying portray a selfish, rude, an almost ignorant way of society such as Jo...
Addie Bundren, the wife of Anse Bundren and the matriarch of a poor southern family, is very ill, and is expected to die soon. Her oldest son, Cash, puts all of his carpentry skills into preparing her coffin, which he builds right in front of Addie’s bedroom window. Although Addie’s health is failing rapidly, two of her other sons, Darl and Jewel, leave town to make a delivery for the Bundrens’ neighbor, Vernon Tull, whose wife and two daughters have been tending to Addie. Shortly after Darl and Jewel leave, Addie dies. The youngest Bundren child, Vardaman, associates his mother’s death with that of a fish he caught and cleaned earlier that day. With some help, Cash completes the coffin just before dawn. Vardaman is troubled by the fact that his mother is nailed shut inside a box, and while the others sleep, he bores holes in the lid, two of which go through his mother’s face. Addie and Anse’s daughter, Dewey Dell, whose recent sexual liaisons with a local farmhand named Lafe have left her pregnant, is so overwhelmed by anxiety over her condition that she barely mourns her mother’s death. A funeral service is held on the following day, where the women sing songs inside the Bundren house while the men stand outside on the porch talking to each other.