Parenting

The poem that I wrote Paper #3 on was Frank O’Hara’s “Ave Maria.”  The poem basically encourages “mothers of America” to let their children go to the movies, but the bigger message is that parents should basically loosen up and try not to set such strict rules, restrictions and limitations for their children. I disagree with this mentality–children absolutely must have structure in their loves, otherwise they will not thrive as individuals. In my digital essay, I tried to show different movie/show clips that exhibit instances of bad parenting with children and then I showed adults on shows like Maury and Jerry Springer going crazy and doing outrageous things. The connection I’m trying to make is that these adults were not raised correctly when they were children, and did not have parents keeping a close enough eye on them, which is why they turned out the way they did.

The Importance of Good Parenting

The point I was hoping to get across with the video of Veruca Salt (from Willy Wonka and the Chocolate Factory) was that parents who let their children have whatever they want become spoiled brats, and are impossible to deal with unless you give them exactly what they want, when they want it. Later on in life, those children don’t know how to accept the fact that they can’t always have all their wishes granted.

The reason I used the particular portion of the Flintstones clip that I did was because Betty tells Barney: “Barney don’t speak mean to him, reason with him.”  That is a perfect example of bad parenting. There’s no reasoning with young children. Maybe you can try reasoning with a 10-year old or a teenager, but it does not work with children younger than that.  A parent who reasons with his/her child will simply get taken advantage of, which is seen in the video when Bam Bam grabs Barney’s finger and begins slamming him around.

The rest of the clips I showed, like the ones with the mother and daughter who aspire to be prostitutes and the 42-year-old woman with a 14-year-old husband, were just funny examples of adults who  act completely ridiculous because they don’t know any limits–they just don’t know when to stop. I think that, had their parents given them more limitations, they would not have been on the Jerry Springer/Maury shows (assuming the Jerry/Maury shows are even real and not staged, which they kind of seem to be).