Child Neglectful Abuse in Jeannette Wall's the Glass Castle (Essay Sample)

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CHILD NEGLECTFUL ABUSE IN JEANNETTE WALL’S THE GLASS CASTLE
Jeannette Wall wrote her memoir The Glass Castle in 2005. It is about her family's life in poverty and pursuit to escape a dysfunctional childhood and form something to make her future better alongside her siblings. As the children try to make their lives better, they go through difficulties of trying to save their parents from being homeless in New York. The Memoir displays multiple acts of child neglect and abuse faced by the Walls children. They face physical, medical, emotional, and educational neglect.
There are several instances where the Wall's family put their children through neglectful abuse. Neglectful abuse is when parents fail to effectively care for their children even when there are diverse choices to care for them but refuse to consider them. For instance, when Walls was three years old, she cooked meals by herself because Rose Mary Walls, her mother, thought that to survive, one should experience life independently. She notes that misery at a young age is good (32). Rose Mary brought up her children differently from other parents. She never set restrictions or punished them, even let the children play out when it rained, and never feared that they might be struck by lightning. She thought that when rules are set, they grip people back, and the best way to raise children is to give them the freedom to achieve their potential.
The Walls’ children suffered hunger, and one of the instances was when Lori and Jeannette decided to combine margarine and sugar because there was no food. “couple of months after Dad lost his job, he came home with a bag of groceries: a can of corn, a half-gallon of milk, a loaf of bread, two tins of deviled ham, a sack of sugar, and a stick of margarine. The can of corn disappeared within minutes…somebody in the family had stolen it” (Walls 75). The thief is unknown, but it could be one of the children because the lack of food can cause one to steal the only available food in the house. Walls notes that she finds her sister Lori eating something, which she discloses is a mixture of sugar and margarine because it tastes like frosting. Since the refrigerator is empty, Jeannette makes the same mixture but notes that it is greasy and crunchy because the sugar did not dissolve but eats it regardless (75). Later on in the memoir, the children find their mother eating a chocolate bar but explains that she is addicted to sugar. This indicates that the mother is selfish because she lets her children famish, yet she snacks on a huge chocolate bar.
Emotional and medical neglect is evident in the memoir because the parents put their needs first and neglect their children. The mother concentrates on her art, and the father his drinking spree and succeeding business project. When the children request for something, the parents often respond negatively, making the children feel like they cannot be dependent on their parents. W