Relationships Between Parents & Children

Relationships between parents and children are often made more complex by the fact that in addition to the strong emotional ties shared between parents and children, children are not yet developed enough to understand the full ramifications of their parents' behavior or communication when young or adolescents. In Ethan Canin's "The Year of Getting to Know Us," Jamaica Kincaid's "Girl," and Robert Hayden's "Those Winter Sundays," we see complex parent-child relationships. However, a common theme uniting these works is the difficulty for the children to fully understand their parents' behavior and communication because of their lack of development. This analysis will compare and contrast these three works in order to show that children often fail to grasp the full significance of their parents' behavior and communication when young.

In Ethan Canin's "The Year of Getting to Know us," we are provided with a short story in which the author is disturbed, in retrospect, by noticing aspects of his father's uncommunicativeness, which he disliked, in his own behavior. At one point in the story the father and son take a trip. The father tells him they are on this trip because he wants his son to know him "because one day you're going to grow up and then you're going to be me," (Canin, p. 42). Though the son longs to know his father more and they seldom play baseball or other activities fathers and sons share, the son only comes to a better understanding of his

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views as love's "austerity," are necessary when being responsible for others, (Hayden, p. 1). Perhaps the speaker has children of his own now. He understands that though he could not appreciate his father's actions and demeanor at the time, love is often demonstrated as a lonely austerity when one sacrifices their own comfort for the comfort of others. In this manner, the speaker comes to appreciate his father's actions and behavior much more than he did as a child, though his repetition of "What did I know" seems to imply he regrets it took him so long to understand, (Hayden, p. 1). In both Canin's short story and Hayden's poem we see sons who initially cannot appreciate their father's behavior or communication or, rather, what appears to them as a lack of communication. In Jamaica Kincaid's brief story "Girl," we see that a lack of communication is hardly the case. The mother in this story is traditional and ethnically oriented. She is a Christian and subscribes to the African religion of obeah, one that posits an inferior role for women compared to men. Instead of a lack of communication, her adolescent daughter is deluged with a constant barrage of advice, tips, and lessons from her mother about how to be, how to work,

Category: Psychology - R