Teen parents: Washing dishes and Creativity
“In order for a child to be successful, they need to grow up in a loving environment with lots of attention” (Jack Elkin, ODU ‘19). This is one of the most common mistakes teen parents can make. I target teen parents in particular because adult parents seem to satisfy their child’s thirst for attention with the flat screen of an iPhone and some soda. Luckily for them, this method seems to work as children are now growing up with 1 thousand followers on Instagram by the time they’re 10; a stellar accomplishment that can be placed right on their resume. I even heard that colleges check Facebook, which obviously means that they’re seeing how many “friends” you have.
Instead, teen moms like Jackie in the novel “The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace” by Jeff Hobbs don’t go out “socially since the birth, and she had no inclination to do so” because of all the attention she was giving the baby (10, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace). This is a vital mistake. Jackie should be more like Skeet, Robert’s father who when Rob “spontaneously recited Go, Dog. Go!” after only hearing it once, triggered Skeet to wonder “why his son’s head was being saturated by stories involving canines picnicking in tree canopies” (16, The Short and Tragic Life of Robert Peace). Skeet, a highly regarded cocaine dealer who is seldom available in Rob’s life is absolutely right. A child at the age of 4 shouldn’t be memorizing rhymes in books, or using their naturally acquired talents and gifts. They should be constructively using their time with other useful skills like selling drugs, posting pictures on Instagram to raise their social status, and finding the fastest route to Starbucks in their brand new Mercedes that their dad bought them. But all of that comes after your adult parents, and not teen moms like Jackie who love their children, have successfully washed your brain with any creativity by handing you a phone.
As a result, the author is pursuing the importance of talent when a child is surrounded by drugs and separated parents. This plays a major role later in the novel when Robert Peace attends and graduates Yale just to go back into the drug trade where his roots were firmly planted as a child. This also leaves me wondering, how should we raise our future generation children? Have our gameboys become their touchscreen phones or is there a difference? And does it truly matter to a child if there is a scarcity of money in the household if they don’t have a scarcity of love? I have also reached page 46 in the novel, close to my 68 page goal. This was largely due to my lack of availability last week as I was away, like Skeet, on Thursday, Friday and Saturday.