One of the most fundamental aspects in the society today has to be the family system. The aspect of family is one that has been discussed in detail in the two short stories, “The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury and “A Mistake” by Akhil Sharma. In this modern day and age, the nature of family relationships is greatly affected by various external factors such as technology and the desire for wealth. Also, the manner in which parents treat and bring up their children is a great determinant of how the children will behave towards them as they grow up. These two short stories explore all these aspects in a diverse manner, and this brings out, from both extremes, the different ways that the way of upbringing, wealth and technology end up affecting the relationship of parents and their children. The perception that children hold regarding their parents is affected by how they are treated by their parents, their upbringing (the level of restriction or permission), and other external factors such as wealth and technology. It is important to strike a blended form of parenting where there is balanced restriction and permission is appropriate to endure the wholesome wellbeing of the children.
“The Veldt” by Ray Bradbury and “A Mistake” by Akhil Sharma are the same in that they both revolve around the idea of family and how a child’s upbringing eventually affects their behavior and attitude towards their parents. “The Veldt” is a story about parents who are too permissive, and the children end up resenting them when they try to punish them. In this case, Lydia and George Harley give their children too much freedom to use technology to the extent that they no longer play their parental roles. Technology is supposed to make life easy, but it makes it too easy for these parents to the extent that it replaces them. (Kawabata, Alink, Tseng, Van & Crick, 2011) argues that too much permission or restriction can spoil the child more and can also trigger mental deformities like anxiety, depression, bipolar and even suicidal ideation. We see this argument in play in “The Veldt,” when Lydia and George try to restrict their children’s access to technology by closing the nursery. The story ends fatally with the children using the same technology accorded to them to kill their father. On the other hand, “A Mistake” is a story about parents who are too restrictive. Birju and his brother are restricted from experiencing a lot of pleasures, and this is mainly because their parents are not very financially stable. Luckily for them, the children grow up disciplined, and when their father amasses fortunes for the family, they develop a deep sense of respect for him when he manages to grow out of poverty after immigration ("Opinion | The Last of the Tiger Parents", 2018).
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A look at the themes presented in “The Veldt” indicated that children who are not raised with proper parental supervision are highly unlikely to submit to discipline. In this story, we see that the parents, Lydia and George Harley have entirely given the role of raising their children to their electronic home, specifically the nursery. Technological advancements have made it possible for these parents to design a house that does everything for them, and they have let it replace them in the lives of their children, Alice and Peter. The children are able to convert the house into anything that they want, and they have even created a realistic African veldt. As a result, the children learn to become independent on their own, and discipline is far from their vocabulary. When the parents try to impose the discipline of the children, they do not receive it lightly, and it results in deadly results (Bradbury, 2018). The case of Birju and his brother in “A Mistake” is the complete opposite. These two children are not as lucky as Alice and Peter, and they come from a financially struggling household. However, as fate would have it, this poor background was a blessing in disguise for the children because they got to grow up under the keen watch of and with a close relationship with their parents. As a result, the children in this story grow up being disciplined, (Sharma, 2018).
As children grow and develop mentally and physically, so do their attitudes take a dramatic shift. In in the two short stories, “The Veldt” and “A Mistake,” the children undergo major shifts in their attitudes. When they were young, Alice and Peter of “The Veldt” loved their parents because they provided them with everything that they wanted. However, it reached a point that they learned to live independent of their parents. It is a universal process to see children shift from deeply loving their parents to extremely disliking them. In the case of Alice and Peter, their lifestyle is deeply affected by technology, and this accelerates this universal process. Initially, the children were very courteous to his parents. However, after they shut down the nursery, they start resenting them. Peter even does to the extent of wishing for his father’s demise when he says to him, “ I wish you were dead ,” (Bradbury, 2018).
The situation in “A Mistake,” is different from “The Veldt.” The younger of the two siblings is the one who narrates the story, and it is evident that when he was small he did not view his father with a high accord because the father did not seem to do anything for the family. He states, “ I used to assume that my father had been assigned to us by the government. This was because he appeared to serve no purpose…Still, I continued to think that he served no purpose.” However, all this notion gets to change as they grow up. The father immigrated to America in search of a fortune, and the family caught up with him later after he had amassed a good fortune. The family now has the hope of making it in America. We get to see the child’s perspective of his father change for the better, and he even views him with admiration, “ My father, who had seemed pointless in India, had brought us to America and now we were rich. The fact that he had achieved this made him seem different, mysterious, ” (Sharma, 2018) .
It is evident from these two narrations that the perception that children hold regarding their parents is affected by how they are treated by their parents, their upbringing, and other external factors such as wealth and technology (Berrett, 2018) .
References
Berrett, T. (2018). Akhil Sharma: "A Mistake." Retrieved from http://mookseandgripes.com/reviews/2014/01/13/akhil-sharma-a-mistake/
Bradbury, R. (2018). The Veldt, a short story by Ray Bradbury. Retrieved from https://sensitiveskinmagazine.com/the-veldt/
Kawabata, Y., Alink, L. R., Tseng, W. L., Van Ijzendoorn, M. H., & Crick, N. R. (2011). Maternal and paternal parenting styles associated with relational aggression in children and adolescents: A conceptual analysis and meta-analytic review. Developmental Review, 31(4), 240-278. Accessed from, https://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0273229711000268 on 7November 2018
Opinion | The Last of the Tiger Parents. (2018). Retrieved from https://www.nytimes.com/2018/06/22/opinion/sunday/asian-american-tiger-parents.html
Sharma, A. (2018). A Mistake. Retrieved from https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2014/01/20/a-mistake
