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How do family dynamics affect child development
Effects of family dynamics
How do family dynamics affect child development
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Connie's actions from being at home too with her friends or being in the house alone as is if she were three different people. Connie is depressed and wishes death upon her mother as she sits home and listens to all her mother's rules. She feels like she needs to rebel constantly against her mother making it hard for her and her mother to get along. Connie’s mother had lost her good looks and Connie thinks she is just jealous of her. While Connie is with her friends she is promiscuous and sexualized. Showing she can be an ‘adult” like her sister Jane she dresses older and shows more skins and Connie can't help but to feel like a little kid and cry for her mother when Arnold is in her house wanting to take her away. Although Connie is promiscuous
Arnold Friend takes advantage of Connie’s teenage innocence for something of a much more sinister purpose. Connie thought she had it all figured out until Arnold Friend came into her life and up her driveway on one summer, Sunday afternoon and made her realize how big and scary the world can be. Arnold embodies everything that Connie has dreamed about in a boy, but is in the most malevolent form of Connie’s dream boy. She always wanted to get away from her family because she has always felt as if she didn’t belong and Arnold can make this possible just in the most predatory way. She always thought sex would be sweet (and consensual) and that she would be in charge of how it progressed, Arnold strips her of the authority she’s held in any other encounter with a boy. The moral of the story is always be careful what you wish
In Joyce Carol Oates's short story, "Where Are You Going, Where Have You Been?" the protagonist introduced is Connie, who is an interesting and strong character. Just like every other teenager, she is searching for a purpose and trying to find her place in society. Although Connie seems to be an incredibly self absorbed teenage girl, there is a part of her personality that is different than the rest. She lives a double life, having one personality around her house, with her family, and the other when she is hanging out with friends in public. Due to this double personality, the reader can't help but become intrigued and question which girl she truly is.
First of all, in “Where Are You Going? Where Have You Been?" the main character Connie exhibits many examples of rebellion towards her parents throughout the entire story. Not only does she display a disrespectful attitude towards her parents but she constantly lies to them on many occasions about where she has been and what she does when she goes out with her friends because “her mother was simple and kind enough to believe her” (Oates 201).
Connie is only concerned about her physical appearance. She can be described as being narcissistic because "she had a quick, nervous giggling habit of craning her neck to glance into mirror or checking other people's faces to make sure her own was all right" (Oates 148). Connie wants her life to be different from everyone else's in her family. She thinks because she is prettier, she is entitled to much more. She wants to live the "perfect life" in which she finds the right boy, marries him, and lives happily ever after. This expectation is nothing less than impossible because she has not experienced love or anything like it. She has only been subjected to a fantasy world where everything is seemingly perfect. This is illustrated in the story when Connie is thinking about her previous encounters with boys: "Connie sat with her eyes closed in the sun, dreaming and dazed with the warmth about her as if this were a kind of love, the caresses of love, and her mind slipped over onto thoughts of the boy she had been with the night before and how nice he had been, how gentle, the way it was in movies and promised in songs" (151).
Connie has the need to be viewed as older and as more mature than she really is, all the while still displaying childlike behavior. She shows this childlike behavior by “craning her neck to glance in mirrors [and] checking other people’s faces to make sure her own was all right” (Oates 323). This shows that Connie is very insecure and needs other people’s approval. Although on one side she is very childish, on the other side she has a strong desire to be treated like an adult. This longing for adulthood is part of her coming of age, and is demonstrated by her going out to “bright-lit, fly-infested restaurant[s]” and meeting boys, staying out with those boys for three hours at a time, and lying to her parents about where she has been and who she has been with (Oates 325, 326). “Everything about her ha[s] two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 324). Even her physical movements represent her two-sided nature: “her walk that could be childlike and bobbing, or languid enough to make anyone think she was hearin...
However, as I continued to read the story I began to wonder if maybe Connie’s life was not in any way parallel to my own. I have a younger sister where she has an older sister, but that is where the similarities end. Her mother is always telling her that she should be more like June, her older sister. It seemed to me that June living with her parents at her age was unusual, but the fact that she seemed to enjoy this and was always doing things to h...
In the story ‘Where are you going, Where have you been?’ by Joyce we can get an insight into Connie's relationship with her mom using the first description we see about Connie's mother and she “noticed everything and knew everything”(4). Here we
When approached by Arnold Friend at first, she was skeptical but was still charmed by him. As she began to feel uneasy, Connie could have used her intuition to realize that he was trouble. Once she had been engaged by Arnold, her life was over. The influences on Connie and her lack of instilled reasoning led to her down fall. Her family’s fragmented nature was echoed in her actions; consequently, she was unable to communicate with her parents, and she was never was able to learn anything of significance. She felt abandoned and rejected, because no one took the initiative to teach her how to make good decisions. Connie was unable to mature until she was faced with death and self sacrifice. In the end, her situation made it difficult for her to think and reason beyond the position she was in. By not being able apply insight, she fell into Arnold Friends lure. Misguidance by the parents strongly contributed to Connie’s
Connie’s clothes and infatuation with her own beauty symbolize her lack of maturity or knowing her true self, which in the end enables her to be manipulated by Arnold Friend. Connie was enamored with her own beauty; in the beginning of the story Oates states that Connie “knew
Rubin attempts to convey the idea that Connie falls asleep in the sun and has a daydream in which her “…intense desire for total sexual experience runs headlong into her innate fear…” (58); and aspects of the story do seem dream like - for instance the way in which the boys in Connie’s daydreams “…dissolved into a single face…” (210), but the supposition that the entire episode is a dream does not ring true. There are many instances in which Connie perceives the frightening truth quite clearly; she is able to identify the many separate elements of Friend’s persona - “… that slippery friendly smile of his… [and] the singsong way he talked…” (214). But because of the lack of attachment with her own family, and her limited experience in relating deeply to others, “…all of these things did not come together” (214) and Connie is unable to recognize the real danger that Arnold Friend poses until it is too late.
First, Connie was constantly going to hang out with her friend Nancy Pettinger, she was unsupervised a lot while she was with her friend. To the knowledge of Connie’s Mother she had no parental supervision well at the plaza, so this could mean that the girls could be doing anything while being alone together there. Second, Connie is know to be never home nor with her Family at events. She was constantly hanging out with her friend and known for being with boy. Third, Connie is known for having two sides of her home side was very different when she is away from home. Connie was very different from her home life to when she was out and about with her friends because she had a different walk, laugh, and even her color of her mouth was very different. Connie isn't a innocent child she is always doing things with her friend outside of her house and she was very different person to according to Connie’s
Where Have You Been?”, Connie’s self-absorbed and narcissistic behavior is abandoned when she is faced with a life-threatening decision that could determine the safety of her family. Connie starts as a self-absorbed and acutely superficial teenage girl who does her best to portray only her most positive characteristics to the world. In actuality, she has a dysfunctional home, her mother is constantly comparing Connie to her worse-looking but more well-kept sister, and she has virtually no relationship with her father. These are all signs of a severely dysfunctional family. In the narrator's words: “Everything about her had two sides to it, one for home and one for anywhere that was not home” (Oates 320). In Connie’s mind, perceived perfection is of the utmost importance, and she leaves all of her grievances behind in social interactions. Specifically, her beauty is what she values most about herself,. Connie believes that “ … she was pretty and that was everything” (Oates 331) It is clear that Connie views things from a very shallow perspective, failing to understand the greater attributes that a person may have. However, when faced with a life-altering threat, Connie’s values abruptly change. When Arnold, a man who claims to be Connie’s age and is later hinted at to be a sexual predator, arrives at her door, Connie begins to understand the now higher stakes at hand and the values she must embrace. When Connie feels threatened and claims that her
This idea has been portrayed outside of this story of having a double life. This detail tells us that Connie’s identity is split: one part of her displays her emerging sexuality by changing her outfit once she leaves the grasp of her family; the other part conforms to what the authorities in her life consider proper. Throughout the beginning of the story, Connie shields her other being from her family in order to portray the image they created for her. Yet when they aren’t around, she is desperate to appeal to the other sex so she changes into clothes and applies makeup to attract their interest. It is this burgeoning inner struggle that foreshadows at Connie’s impending loss of innocence. She is starting to rebel against her family’s wishes
due to her family leaving to attend a barbeque. Like Chet, Connie also has to rely on herself to overcome her obstacles, such as the threatening Arnold Friend. Stegner and Oates both use this plot point in order to establish that their characters cannot rely on their family for help or protection, which emphasizes their transition to adulthood. In Stegner’s depiction, the purpose seems to be the successful overcoming of obstacles that a child, specifically a boy, has to go through in order to become a man.
At one point in the book, Connie had wished death upon not only herself, but her own mother. the fact that Connie’s mother was possibly jealous of her own daughter, or just protecting her. Connie’s mother came off as someone who was jealous of Connie’s life when it came to boys, but also very being mother like, and trying to help her own daughter stay away from what Arnold Friend was trying to lure Connie into. Personally, I feel as if a mother should not be jealous of her own child, because there is no reason to feel jealousy towards your own, or any child. Connie could have possibly been jealous of her mother, as her mother was known to be beautiful. The author had said Connie was also very pretty, but if that was the case then why would that make her feel jealousy towards her mom for being pretty. This part of the book confused me because I felt as if a family should not hate on each other or wish death upon anyone,