house, and that means that she never gets raped and killed. She wants to experience more and experiment in life and grow up. Connie gets all of these things and has her right of passage but not how she wants it to be. She grows up and sacrifices herself for her family. Normally bad parenting costs everyone a good start in life, in this case it costs Connie the rest of her life. In the short story “Everyday use” by Alice Walker there is good parenting and it shows its face at the end of the story.
This is not a very wealthy family by any means of the imagination. Despite the lack of money mom gave all that she could and provide for her family. They all had food and clothes and a roof over their heads and Dee was still not proud of them. Dee wrote mom once “that no matter where we ‘chose’ to live, she will manage to come see us but she will never bring her friends” (Walker 317). So, mom does her job to raise Dee and Maggie well and provide for them, but Dee always gets what she wants over Maggie. Mom could never say no. Dee comes home and wants stuff to decorate her apartment and mom gives her some, but the real change comes when mom tells Dee no she cannot have the quilt that is Maggie’s inheritance from grandma Dee. Mom does the right thing and does not let Dee take Maggie’s quilts. Never the less a poor single mom manages to raise two girls and put one into college and stands up for the other one when she never has before is pretty good
parenting.
When reading “Those Winter Sundays” by Robert Hayden we see a transition from a boy to a man with a father who cares. We know that the father cares because he puts his son before his himself. He would work all week with “cracked hands that ached from labor” (Hayden, 3) and then he would get up in the “blueblack cold” (Hayden 2) and start a fire on Sunday. This is important “Because it should be a day of rest, particularly for the hard-working father” (Scalia 14). The father would even polish his son’s good shoes, but still no one ever thanks him. When his son goes through the right of passage he grows up and reflects on what his father did for him and is dumbfounded and he seems to have a new-found respect for his father. A good parent’s love can go a long way for a child and seemingly forgotten for years but once it is noticed it is never forgotten.