December 4, 2016 - 20:29
Parenting and Children Development
Phoenix, who brought a knife to school, who wanted to run away from his home, decided to stay with his mother at the end of the book All Over Creation. Being the oldest son of the heroine, Phoenix had a very rebellious character and showed great disrespect to his mother Yumi. The focus of this essay is to examine the impact of social environment on Phoenix’s rebellious character and the cause of his decisions listed at the beginning.
Phoenix’s social environment can be divide into three parts: family, school, and friends. His family provided him with a sense of insecurity, his school reinforced the stress, and his friends were his only comfort. His rebellious character was a result of the former two factors of social environment, and his wish to run away from home largely come from the comfort he found with his friends.
When Phoenix encountered a trouble, the first thing he thought of was not telling the grown-ups, but to deal with it himself. This is because his family, mainly his mother, failed to provide him support, stability and sense of security. He tried to carry a knife for his own protection. He never told Yumi a word about the bully he encountered in school because he knew she was not going to do anything helpful. It is hard to blame Phoenix for his disrespect towards his mother. It is Yumi who should be blamed for.
Yumi has failed the role as a mother, according to other characters in the book (Ozeki, 390&409), and even more so in the eyes of the readers. To start with, Yumi did not provide a stable home for her children: She moved from California to Oregon to Texas to Hawaii before Phoenix was five, and she changed her partner at least three times in Phoenix’s short fourteen years of life. These factors all contributed to Phoenix’s lack of sense of belongingness, and hence made Phoenix felt a sense of insecurity.
Secondly, Yumi had lost Phoenix’s trust for taking little responsibility for her children. For one, she frequently lets her friend Cass take care of her baby Poo so that she could have time to meet her lover Elliot (Ozeki, 235). It is not hard to imagine her doing the same thing to Phoenix when Phoenix was Poo’s age. When Phoenix was first bullied in school for being an Asian, Yumi did not take any action to protect him, all she said was “In Hawaii it makes big difference, we differentiate between ethnocultural styles of breaking noses” (Ozeki, 127) before she turned away to worry about her jobs. It was because of Yumi being a so irresponsible and unreliable mother that made Phoenix choose to not come to Yumi at once when he was pointed with a gun in school, but tried to deal with the problem himself.
Last but not least, Phoenix did not trust Yumi as a mother also because she did not know how to take care of people. When the Seeds were gone and Lloyd became Yumi’s responsibility to take care of, she did not even care to differentiate what a patient can and cannot eat. She made Lloyd salty fried egg despite her children reminding her that Lloyd was not supposed to take high cholesterol high sodium fried food. Let alone the fact that the food was terribly cooked. She was impatient with her father, reluctant to even help him walk to the rest room (Ozeki, 250&251). It is not hard to imagine her being impatient with her children when they need help as well. In fact, it is exactly her impatient and irresponsible behaviors that lead to Phoenix’s rebellious character.
Of course, it would not be as harsh for Phoenix had he not moved to Idaho. Despite her mother’s failure in providing him the sense of safety, the social environment in school also gave lots of stress on him. In Idaho, where the majority of the residents are white, Phoenix felt extremely exotic by being a three-fourth Asian. The kids in his school must have felt the same way, for they started bullying him for being Asian and for his strange name less than a week after the semester started. Surrounded by aggressive schoolmates in school but cannot find any comfort in home, Phoenix felt anxious and the need to protect himself. Here, luckily, he met the Seeds of Resistance, who showed up from nowhere, dressed like hippies, but solved all the issues that Yumi was unable to solve.
Phoenix respected and admired The Seeds for being the opposite of Yumi in many ways; they provided him all the things that Yumi was unable to provide: attention, love, care-taking, even security. The Seeds was the only place where Phoenix could truly find comfort in. For example, Yumi was too impatient to spent time playing games with her children, but Lilith was patient enough; Yumi was unable to give much attention to Phoenix because she thought she was busy, but Frankie would be the big brother of Phoenix; Yumi was incapable of taking care of her father, Y was professional enough to take over the job; Yumi was a terrible cook, but Charmey was not; Yumi refused new information and concepts, but Geek himself was the representative of new concepts. Most importantly, the Seeds showed Phoenix what it looked like to be responsible. Seeds soon became Phoenix’s role model; Phoenix was even proud of being in jail for that was what the seeds had been through (Ozeki, 265). All these made Phoenix wanting to go with them.
Unlike Yumi, however, Phoenix did not leave his loved ones behind. He stayed. Part the reason why he stayed was that, unlike Yumi, Phoenix was in touch with a good role model Frankie, who told Phoenix to talk with Yumi before he leave. Under Frankie’s guidance, Phoenix was able to sense Yumi’s love for him. Before the talk, he thought Yumi “don’t give a shit about me” (Ozeki, 400), but after the talk, Phoenix finally learned that his mother cared him as much as any mother does. He stayed, for he did not want to hurt his loved ones.
It is obvious that Yumi and her parenting style had a great impact on Phoenix’s development. However, Yumi’s parenting style was definitely not the most successful one. Given the huge impact of parent’s parenting style on children’s development, what then, is the best parenting style? This is a question yet to be examine.
Work Cited
Ruth Ozeki. All Over Creation. New York: Penguin, 2004.