The Ideal Parent Essay Research Paper The

The Ideal Parent Essay, Research Paper

The Ideal Parent:

Can One Ever Exist?

Many kids complain about their parents. I hear it all the time from all kinds of kids who come from all sorts of different backgrounds. It seems in the world today parents get all the negative attention, and it seems like all the good they do go unnoticed by the public. Two different kinds of mothers were presented in the stories “Two Kinds” by Amy Tan, and “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen. Sometimes children complain about their mothers, each wishing they could have different type of mom. The lives and situations of each mother were different, but in my opinion, both mothers were a bad model for parenting.

“I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen shows us a mother who is struggling through her own life and does not pay any attention to her daughter. The mother in this story happens to be the narrator, and we get the indication that she isn’t a very good mother. To start, she was very young when she first had Emily. “I was nineteen. It was the pre-relief, pre-WPA world of the depression” (241). She was not ready to be a mother, and it certainly wasn’t the best time for a young girl to have a child. This is not a good model for parenting. A mother should have a child at a time when she feels she is prepared to able to properly care for a child. Emily’s mom was poor, and without a husband as a father figure for Emily. She could not even afford the expenses when Emily was really young and, “it came to where I had to bring her to his family and leave her” (242). She had to send Emily away a couple of times through her young childhood. Emily was sent away at a time where a mother would have been very important in shaping, influencing, and nurturing her to become a great adult. Emily never got that chance.

Emily’s mother was too lenient. A child should have rules, or some kind of structure to help them develop a good character. Emily didn’t go to school when she didn’t feel like it, and her mom let her. She even stated:

I let her be absent, though sometimes the illness was imaginary. How different from my now-strictness about attendance with the others. I wasn’t working. We had a new baby. I was home anyhow. Sometimes, after Susan grew old enough, I would keep her home from school too, to have them all together. (244)

This shows how selfish the mother was. She wanted everyone to be home with her at the expense of their education. She let her children do whatever they wanted to. At the end of the story, Emily decides not to take her midterms. This is an example of what happens when a child is allowed to do whatever they want. Emily grows up not realizing her full potential, and is constantly robbed of the opportunity to better herself.

At the end of “I Stand Here Ironing,” Emily’s mom acknowledges the fact that she was a bad parent. “We were poor and could not afford for her the soil of easy growth. I was a young mother, I was a distracted mother?My wisdom came too late. She has much to her and probably little will come of it” (246). Even after all that has happened, Emily’s mom still stays out of Emily’s life. The diction shown by Olsen suggests that even though Emily’s mom realizes her mistakes, she will do nothing to correct them and continue to have very little presence on Emily’s life. “Let her be. So all that is in her will not bloom-but in how many does it?” (246).

The mother in Amy Tan’s “Two Kinds” is vastly different than the one mentioned in “I Stand Here Ironing” by Tillie Olsen. Tan immediately begins her story saying that this “mother believed you could be anything you wanted to be in America” (247). She already went through hard times in China, so she knew the importance of succeeding in America. One of the main reasons I believe Jing-mei’s mother is a bad model for parenting is because of the fact that she put too much pressure on her daughter to succeed. She cared so much for Jing-mei, that it eventually became a negative influence on her. One method she used to push her to succeed was to test her:

Every night after dinner, my mother and I would sit at the Formica kitchen table. She would present new tests, taking her examples from stories of amazing children she had read in Ripley’s Believe It or Not, or Good Housekeeping, Reader’s Digest, and a dozen other magazines she kept in a pile in our bathroom. (248)

All this pressure towards succeeding eventually caused disappointment. The tone and diction seem to change as the further the story goes. Jing-mei’s attitude towards her mother changes from wanting to succeed for her, to purposely failing for her. “And right then, I was determined to put a stop to her foolish pride” (251). Jing-mei also starts arguing more and more with her mother and shows a more rebellious side. All the pressure to be a prodigy causes Jing-mei to develop a low self-esteem.

It was not the only disappointment my mother felt in me. In the years that followed, I failed her so many times, each time asserting my own will, my right to fall short of expectations. I didn’t get straight As. I didn’t become class president. I didn’t get into Stanford. I dropped out of college. For unlike my mother, I did not believe I could be anything I wanted to be. I could only be me. (254)

There are two different kinds of mothers addressed in each of these works. Emily’s mom wa