My Girl Movie Analysis

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My Girl When it came time to pick a stage of development, I chose the stage of middle childhood. The movie that best depicted this stage of development to me was the 1991 movie “My Girl”. In this movie, you see a 11-year-old girl named Vada Sultenfuss going through a lot of psychosocial and cognitive changes in her life. She has grown up without her mother due to instant death when being born and she blames herself for her mother’s passing. Her dad is very absent in the upbringing of Vada, as he focuses most of his time and energy into his work as a mortician. Vada is surrounded by death due to the fact that they live in the house where her father constructs his business which is why her view on death is demented. When her dad becomes involved …show more content…

When Thomas Jay suddenly and unexpectedly passes away from an allergic reaction to bee stings, Vada is torn apart by his untimely death due to the fact that Thomas and her were extremely close to one another. Vada then enters the stage of denial and grieving. She goes to visit the doctor that day in a panic complaining that she can’t breathe, that the pain from the bee stings are too much to handle. The book depicts to us that this sort of behavior being shown can be construed as externalizing the internal emotional pain she is feeling because she isn’t sure how to express herself in this certain situation. When Vada leaves the doctor’s office to return to the funeral of Thomas Jay, it is very obvious that she is not willing to accept the death of her best friend, as she still speaks to him as if he was still alive. The book tells us that both internalizing and externalizing behaviors are more likely in children who come from families with high levels of discord (Papalia, 2014, pg297). This reasoning helps explain why Vada is constantly expressing herself through internalizing and externalizing behaviors throughout the entire movie. This reasoning can also help us to understand why Vada exhibits hypochondriac behavior that causes her to believe that any disease is contagious and she inherits these diseases by being around the dead at the funeral

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