The Big Move Case

How much effect do the choices parents make have on the children they are raising? In The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls, she describes a life of moving around from the West Coast all the way to the East Coast. The children in this story never had a stable environment to live in, and they were always on the run. Half of the story takes place in the deserts of Arizona and the other half in Welch, West Virginia. While the Walls family is in the desert the children had a happy life, they lived in houses with roofs, had hot lunch at school every day, friends, and toys to play with. Walls had such an optimistic view on life, Then all of a sudden all of the good stuff was behind them and they were transplanted in West Virginia. They had a lot of hardships while they were in the desert, but it was nothing like it was when they were living in Welch. The move had a lot of effects on Lori, Jeannette, Brian, and Maureen. They had to adjust to awful living conditions, unfriendly people, and being hungry a lot.

In The Glass Castle, the author describes living in a lot of different places, "We counted eleven places we had lived, then we lost track. We couldn't remember the names of some of the towns or what the houses we had lived in looked like. Mostly, I remembered the inside of the cars" (Walls 29). Moving around a lot has a big impact on children. Children should be brought up in a stable environment, with parents that love them and provide for them.

It would be awful never knowing how long they are going to stay or when they are going to leave. The Walls family was always doing the 'skedaddle'. Rex would wake the family up in the middle of the night and give them fifteen minutes to get everything they needed. They cannot make lasting friendships, or even get a proper education. There are a lot of things that were affected when the Walls family moved to West Virginia. Before they moved they were living in Grandma Smith's old adobe house in Phoenix, rent free, because Rose Mary inherited it when her mother died. They went to a school where they were recognized as being gifted. Moving around so much means that parents can't have reliable jobs, the kids won't have any friends, and every time the move they have to get all new things because they can only bring what will fit in the car, and with five people that is not very much stuff. The sense of having a place to call home is lost.