What Happens After They Grow Up?

Last night we watched a movie I had recently ordered from Amazon, Cross Creek. It starred Mary Steenburgen, Rip Torn and Peter Coyote. It is a movie about best selling author, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, who wrote The Yearling. If you are not familiar with this story, (it is about a young boy in the book), in the movie, Cross Creek, it is about a young girl who has a pet fawn. The fawn starts getting into gardens and creating trouble as it grows up. After all, it is wild animal. The father warns his daughter that the pet fawn has to be kept fenced or it will have to killed. He tells her it does not know how to live in the wild now because she made a pet of it. People depend on their gardens to live, and a deer will destroy their gardens and people will starve. Of course, the deer ends up having to be shot.It destroys the father and daughter's relationship forever.

This movie made me think about a situation I am in at present. A wild animal that is taken in as a baby and treated as a pet does not know how to go out into the wild and live like it is supposed to. It may go out into the wild and then come back to the home and try to live in both worlds. But it cannot. In my own life, children in my family were not really parented in the normal way. As much as I loved my mother, she spoiled all her grandchildren and would never punish them or ever make them face up to anything they did wrong. I don't know why she was that way with her grandchildren as she was not like that with my brother and me, her own children.

I raised my own son so he was taught right from wrong, even when my mother excused him from something wrong he had done. He has turned out to be a honest, caring adult. I am proud of him. The other grandchildren are another story. My parents parented them on week-ends and school vacations and all summer. In fact, they came to my parents' house as soon as school was out for the summer and did not return home until it was time to go back to school.

I am not making judgement on the parents involved, but it makes me see the comparison. A child that is not taught right from wrong, will grow up causing trouble and hurting people. Stealing, lying, among other traits not usually smiled upon in our society. Not to mention becoming a parent themselves and not knowing how. If parents or grandparents think they are helping a child by not punishing or reprimanding them when they are young, they are sadly mistaken. Not nurturing them to become an adult who genuinely cares or feels compassion for others is the worst thing a parent can do.

Copyright © 2012 Kathleen G. Lupole

All Photographs Copyright © 2012  Kathleen G. Lupole