DeParle Article Response

The article Two Classes in America, Divided by I Do by DeParle, make for a good comparison to The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls. Basically, what DeParle says in her article, is that children who have both parents are more likely to succeed then their single parent counterparts. the best example of this would be the study made by the Brookings Institution, "Among those raised in the poorest third as teenagers, 58 percent living with two parents moved up to a higher level as adults, compared with just 44 percent of those with an absent parent"(9). This shows for the most part, the importance that parents play on a child's development and their eventual well being. this is because having two parents, for the most part, lends to a stable environment for them to grow and learn. This however is not always the case according to Scott Winship, "And even if the marriage helped the people who got married, he warns, it might hurt other families if it tied them to troubled men"(9). This is when the caparison to The Glass Castle really makes itself clear. Because she had two parents, Jeannette Walls should have pulled herself up out of lower income. She did, but that does not mean that having two parents helped, in fact it hurt her chances in many ways. This is because her father and mother were not stable people, her father was a drunk and would disappear for days at a time, and her mother cared more about art then her children. The reason why Jeannette Walls was able to make it out of poverty was because she worked hard and chose to get an education, not because her parents were married.