Introduction The unique childhood of David in A Called Child “It” by Dave Pelzer is ripe for psychological analysis. This essay will examine the how the boy’s environment affected him, his cognitive development and his moral reasoning skills using the theories of Bronfenbrenner, Piaget, and Kohlberg respectively. Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Model The school district initially fails Dave when they fail to call his mother after he started stealing food from the classroom across the hall because his nutritional needs were still not being met. When they do call his mother again it is because of a teacher’s report of his torn clothes, many bruises and being tiredness in the classroom. His mother’s interaction with the school is positive …show more content…
David finds protection in his Father’s shadow but his father’s job as a firefighter keeps him at the station sometimes even overnight on call. Initially the mother would hurt David behind closed doors and when his Father was gone. His father’s job is one part of his exosystem that fails him. His grandmother is part of his exosystem because she lives outside of his home and immediate day-to-day family. She tries to influence the Mother to no avail and instead of continuing to try and change her daughters mind or taking in other avenue she removes herself from the boys exosystem just as the father leaves the boy’s microsystem in the end. These close family members are the worst offenders in the boys environment because they have an idea of the severity of abuse going on at home and do …show more content…
“In order to survive, I could never give into her” (p 43) In this quote, David realized that his survival is more important than explicitly following his mother’s rules. Being able to think as he does about the greater good of a situation instead of just the rules indicates he is in the post conventional stage of moral reasoning. Dave Pelzer is in the Post-conventional stage throughout his memoir. Early on in the book he explains his reasoning, followed by numerous examples of him breaking rules and laws for the greater good. His obedience to his mother to avoid punishment might suggest a pre-conventional ideals of morality but because he does this purely for his survival and proceeds to break the laws and other rules because he is not allowed food suggests post-conventional morality. “Not only was I able to snitch food from my classmates again, but I also sprinted to the grocery store about once a week” (p 62). David breaks the rules by stealing food from his classmates, leaving the classroom, and stealing food from the grocery store. His survival has become more important than the rules. This quote exemplifies his post-conventional morality throughout the
First, David’s mother gave him enough courage to keep hope his father would be all right after the Nazis arrested him. Because their own house was no longer safe from Nazi invasion, David’s family was staying with friends. However, Nazis burst into the house they were staying in on...
There are many policy issues that affect families in today’s society. Hunger is a hidden epidemic and one major issue that American’s still face. It is hard to believe that in this vast, ever growing country, families are still starving. As stated in the book Growing Up Empty, hunger is running wild through urban, rural, and even suburban communities. This paper will explore the differing perspectives of the concerned camp, sanguine camp, and impatient camp. In addition, each camps view, policy agenda, and values that underlie their argument on hunger will be discussed.
Maturity changes the way people think act and behave towards other people, David the main character displays this clearly as his view on his Father and Uncle Frank develop and change. At the beginning when we are first introduce to all the characters , we see that David admires Uncle Franks as being a hero and just a all round qualities. But this is all changes when David later on discovers that Uncle Frank molesters and take advantage of Indian woman with his power as a doctor. “After what just happened with Marie I don’t want to be left alone with Uncle Frank”. Davis father is a sheriff, a very unique one as he does not wear a badge or carry any gun. David’s attitude towards his father also changes, David did not believe his father played the role of sheriff as he should have but this all changes when the incident with Uncle Frank and Maire is taken place. As Wesley doses t...
A Child Called “It” is a story based on a real life little boy’s tribulations with his mothers shocking abuse. The first part of Dave's life was idyllic in his memory--he says his family was "the Brady Bunch"--a loving mother and father with whom he enjoyed wonderful holidays and a happy trip to the Russian River. Everyone on the outside thought that David’s family was perfect. No one in their neighborhood would have suspected anything was wrong. All that changed when Dave was in first grade. For no known reason, his mother singled him out from his siblings and began abusing him. The abuse began relatively mildly. When he and his brothers did something wrong, Dave was the one to receive punishment--at first simply banishment to the corner of a bedroom. Then, his mother began spending her days watching TV and drinking beer. Easily irritated, she yelled at Dave for the slightest reason, or sometimes for no reason at all. Soon, instead of making him go down to the basement, Mrs. Pelzer smashed Dave's face against the mirror, then made him repeat, over and over, "I'm a bad boy! I'm a bad boy!" He was forced to stand for hours staring into that mirror. Dave's father soon joined The Mother, as David called her, in her drinking. He, too, knew David was a "good boy." He did not join in the abuse, but he did not to stop it, either. David was treated like a slave in his own home. His mother treated him as if he wasn’t even a member of the family like a nobody or an “It”. She first referred to him as, “The Boy, then it quickly changed to It”. Nobody at his school liked him, they called him "Pelzer Smelzer" because his mom never washed his clothes and made him wear the same thing every day. After school, o...
In the book it tells about him and his relationship with alcoholic mother, who beats him, starves him, refuses to give him new clothes, and doesn’t call him by his name but refers to him as "it" or "the boy". At first Dave and his mother have a perfect relationship. Soon his mother starts to drink and singles out one of her sons as the family "slave". She begins her abuse by sending him to school with the same cloths on for a year and no food at all. So for a while Dave steals food from others student’s lunch bags to fill his stomach. Soon his mother ...
David loved his step- mother very much and was often jealous of her other commitments and lack of soul attention towards him. During his early teens, David was informed that his step- mother had been fighting breast cancer for some time. He was previously unaware, and felt betrayed by his uninforming parents. Pearl's steady decline left him devastated, and her death in 1967 found him suddenly alone with his father (Bardsley 2001). Traumatic events like David losing his mother does a great deal to an individual's development in society due to the fact that there is no longer a positive cohesive whole unit as a family. We find that many people who lack a solid family background struggle later in life. An example of this would be the two guest speakers that spoke to our criminal justice class on November 12, 2001. Both individuals had parents who were once in jail or they had a limited relationship with.
"Children of the Forest" is a narrative written by Kevin Duffy. This book is a written testament of an anthropologist's everyday dealings with an African tribe by the name of the Mbuti Pygmies. My purpose in this paper is to inform the reader of Kevin Duffy's findings while in the Ituri rainforest. Kevin Duffy is one of the first and only scientists to have ever been in close contact with the Mbuti. If an Mbuti tribesman does not want to be found, they simply won't be. The forest in which the Mbuti reside in are simply too dense and dangerous for humans not familiar with the area to enter.
“A Child Called it” is a phenomenal book. After reading Dave Pelzer’s story about the horrors he experienced as a child, I’m glad he had the courage to share his story. As a child, Dave’s alcoholic mother physically, emotionally, and mentally abused him. The author portrays to the reader just how bad his childhood really was by writing about the time his mother stabbed him, the times she would make it sit in a cold bath, the times she would put him in a “gas chamber”, and even about the time she purposefully burned him using the stove. Even though Dave experienced all this traumatic events early in life and had many risk factors that put him at risk for failure, his resiliency and his will to live is what saved him in the end.
1. In the book, the father tries to help the son in the beginning but then throughout the book he stops trying to help and listens to the mother. If I had been in this same situation, I would have helped get the child away from his mother because nobody should have to live like that. The father was tired of having to watch his son get abused so eventually he just left and didn’t do anything. David thought that his father would help him but he did not.
Video games bring a sense of the reality to most people, especially if you are a hardcore gamer. They bring reality by essentially creating a virtual world that feels as if you are living in the real world. Lucky Wander Boy by D.B. Weiss is transmitting a certain message to a certain audience. The novel is intended to enthrall an audience consisted of video game enthusiasts around their late twenties and thirties. Lucky Wander Boy is sending a message to the audience, the message is experiencing living the real life through a video game; just like they may have experienced before. The book is fundamentally illustrating the thoughts and experiences this group of people might have gone through during the golden age of video game. The book does this by showing us the narrative of Adam Pennyman, the protagonist of the book coping with his struggles through a video game. Video games revive Adams actual life to some extent; without the game he would not find any point in his life because of all the struggles and negativity he has been through. The book Lucky Wander Boy by W.B. Weiss is about a man named Adam Pennyman during the golden age of video games trying to find the perfect game. Throughout the book Adam Pennyman is creating an encyclopedia of every game he has created. The encyclopedia is called Catalogue of Obsolete Entertainments and in it he has referenced video games such as Pac-Man, Donkey Kong, Frogger, and many others. The encyclopedia ends up becoming more personal instead of reviewing the games. Later in the novel Adam begins to lose interest in the encyclopedia because he wants to find out how the game, Lucky Wander Boy, that he played for hours on end as a kid ended. Adam eventually ends up getting a job as a copywrite...
Inside Toyland, written by Christine L. Williams, is a look into toy stores and the race, class, and gender issues. Williams worked about six weeks at two toy stores, Diamond Toys and Toy Warehouse, long enough to be able to detect patterns in store operations and the interactions between the workers and the costumers. She wanted to attempt to describe and analyze the rules that govern giant toy stores. Her main goal was to understand how shopping was socially organized and how it might be transformed to enhance the lives of workers. During the twentieth century, toy stores became bigger and helped suburbanization and deregulation. Specialty toy stores existed but sold mainly to adults, not to children. Men used to be the workers at toy stores until it changed and became feminized, racially mixed, part time, and temporary. As box stores came and conquered the land, toy stores started catering to children and offering larger selections at low prices. The box stores became powerful in the flip-flop of the power going from manufacturers to the retailers. Now, the retail giants determine what they will sell and at what price they will sell it.
David growing up as a child lived in a house where there was no love shown or caring relationships. He grew up not knowing what good relationships looked like or felt like. David did not think too highly of his dad or aunt and always had
The traumatic effect of the physical, mental, and emotional abuse marked Pelzer’s life. Through a psychological point of view, it is visible that there are many ways the abuse affected David. David was mistreated in ways that made him wonder why. I was also left feeling perplexed and sometimes feeling frustrated, I wanted to know why David 's mother singled him out for her abuse. Then, I realized that this was the same frustration David has lived with most of his
...e on her part. Throughout the story, the Mother is portrayed as the dominant figure, which resembled the amount of say that the father and children had on matters. Together, the Father, James, and David strived to maintain equality by helping with the chickens and taking care of Scott; however, despite the effort that they had put in, the Mother refused to be persuaded that Scott was of any value and therefore she felt that selling him would be most beneficial. The Mother’s persona is unsympathetic as she lacks respect and a heart towards her family members. Since the Mother never showed equality, her character had unraveled into the creation of a negative atmosphere in which her family is now cemented in. For the Father, David and James, it is only now the memories of Scott that will hold their bond together.
In the book “There Are No Children Here” by Alex Kotlowitz, the author followed the lives of two young brothers (Lafayette and Pharoah) while they grew up in the harsh streets of Chicago in the late 1980’s. The author uses the story of the two boys’ lives to discuss the social divide in our very own society and to persuade readers that there is a major problem in “the projects” of the United States.