Jeannette strikes me as the type of person who doesn’t give up on something once she sets her mind to it. I respect her for that. Jeannette could have accepted her life as a squatter, but instead she improved her life and became successful from it. By working hard and as Jeannette says “playing the heck out of her cards” she was able to create a new life for herself. A new life that was free of the stigma of her past. In fact she used her past to better herself, she used all of her bad experiences and learned from every single one of them, from burning herself with the water to petting the cheetah. All of these experiences Jeannette took and learned from. Jeannette also always stayed positive in the face of adversity which is another thing to admire about her.
Her parents on the other hand were totally different. Her parents can be described two ways, “monsters who should have had the kids taken away or free-spirited creates who had a lot of wisdom parents today don’t” (Walls). I do not necessarily agree with either of those statements but if I was to pick one it would be “monsters who should have had the kids taken away”. I would pick this mostly because the bad things that the parents did outweighted the good by far. They were definitely unfit parents and the children would have had a much better life had they been moved to a different family but it would have changed the way they grew up. I would not completely disagree with the other statement however. I believe that however messed up it may be, that the Walls parents did have some wisdom that parents today don’t. They did not baby their children in any way shape or form, which toughen them up for the real world. Sometimes today I feel as though children are coddled so much that they become dependent on everyone else around them. That is what happened to Maureen, except it wasn’t her parents doing the coddling, it was her friends parents. None of the other children were coddled and they turned out better than Maureen. Even though they do have some wisdom the parents did not exactly execute that wisdom is the best way they could have. There are many better ways to teach children then the ways that the Walls parents taught their children. They could have had a completely different approach to their parenting and still taught their children the same morals. That is why I would deem them as monsters. Like I said before, sometimes the bad outweighs the good, and in this case the examples of bad parenting definitely outweighed the examples of good parenting.