are you making good decisions for your

Lauren Cottrell
Mrs. Clark
English 11 H
10 October 2014
Are You Making A Good Decision For Your Child? All parents want their child to become successful. Some parents will go to great lengths to “help” their child by signing them up for a club, sport, or other extracurricular activities that will be “good” for them and their future. Usually the child ends up hating it or it causes something bad to happen. Even though parents might think they’re making a good decision for their child, it could end up as the bad decision that could potentially ruin the parent/ child relationship, lead to trouble later in life, or ruining the child’s chance of doing something for themselves. A parent can potentially ruin their relationship with their child if the make a bad decision for their child. If their child disagrees with the decision of the parent, the child could begin to resent them. Like in the story, I Stand Here Ironing, the narrator is the mother of a girl named Emily. The narrator tries to provide a good life for Emily but even then their relationship suffers because she does not show her daughter love like she does with her other children, like when her little sister, Susan, was a baby, the narrator paid lots of attention to her and not to Emily, “She would call for me, and I would rouse from exhaustion to sleepily call back: ‘You’re all right, darling, go to sleep, it’s just a dream,’ and if she still called, in a sterner voice, ‘now to go sleep, Emily, there’s nothing to hurt you.’ Twice, only twice, when I had to get up for Susan anyhow, I went in to sit with her.” (Olsen). This harms their relationship because Emily knows her mother chooses Susan over her even when she was little. Later on, when Emily is in her high school years, she and her mom are not very close still. Based on this we can see that making a bad decision for your child can leave the parent/child relationship in ruins. Making a bad decision for can also affect the child in the future. It could influence them to a life of despair. In the story Teenage Wasteland, Donny gets into trouble a lot in his high school years but when used to be good when he was younger so as he has been doing bad things, his parents have been getting stricter and stricter which is only the start. His mother decides to be less controlling and then, “He said they acted like wardens. On weekends, they enforced curfew. And anytime he went to a party, they always telephoned first to see if adults would be supervising. ‘For God’s sake!’ he said. ‘Don’t you trust me?’” (Tyler). This causes his parents to try not to control him as much to make him happy but he spirals from here into him getting expelled for alcohol possession and later running away. The decision to be less strict on Donny was a mistake because this allowed him to make a mistake that will affect him forever. Bad decision can also ruin the child’s future. A parent’s bad decision for their child can also ruin their hope to do something that will make them happy. The child could want to do something that interests them but based on the decision their parent makes then do not feel capable of doing what makes them happy. A Modern Indian Woman’s Struggle with Arranged Marriage is a great example of this because the author struggles with her parents trying to choose her husband for her like a traditional arranged marriage. Her father goes on different Indian nationality dating websites and picks a man based on a profile and sets them up. She finds it funny that her parents do this for her but she really is limited by this choice and has to only go out with men that are of her dad’s approval (Jain). This makes it hard for the thirty year old to find a husband. This ruins her hope of finding someone that she likes for them and marrying them. Bad choices by parents can hinder the child in the end instead of helping them. Parents should think about the child’s whenever they make decisions for them so they do not hurt them in these ways.

Works Cited
Tyler, Anne. “Teenage Wasteland.” 1983. Print. (Tyler)
Olsen, Tillie. “I Stand Here Ironing.” <i>Tell Me A Riddle</i>. 1961. Print. (Olson)
Jain, Anita. “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?” <i>New York<i/> Print.

Cited: Tyler, Anne. “Teenage Wasteland.” 1983. Print. (Tyler) Olsen, Tillie. “I Stand Here Ironing.” <i>Tell Me A Riddle</i>. 1961. Print. (Olson) Jain, Anita. “Is Arranged Marriage Really Any Worse Than Craigslist?” <i>New York<i/> Print.