Final essay

Your Name Subject and Section Professor’s Name December 15, 2024 Parental Expectations and the Struggle for Identity Parental expectations can feel like an invisible weight, shaping every child's choices. Parents want the best for their kids, but sometimes their dreams become pressures that are hard to escape. Sometimes, it does not need to be something big—pressure and expectation can come from small things. My mom always wanted to play piano when she was a kid, but because the family was poor, she could not play it, and now she wants me to play it for her. My mom wants me to be a soft-spoken, modest individual, elegant, and delicate person like her. She wants me to dress in ways that fit her standards and style. She dreams of me becoming a doctor because we have family members who passed away due to sickness. She insists that she knows what is best for me and that I need to follow her. It was suffocating. This tension is deeply felt in White Teeth, the 2000 novel by Zadie Smith. Samad Iqbal, a father desperate to preserve his Bengali roots, pushes his sons to follow his strict ideals. Similarly, Clara and Archie Jones want happiness for their daughter, Irie, but their insecurities cloud their guidance. The Weight of Parental Expectations In childhood, I struggled between who I wanted to be and who my mom wanted me to be. It meant being graceful and successful and wearing the life I wanted. Sometimes, it radically differed from my vision. This reflects the relationship between Samad and his twin children, Magid and Millat. Although he wanted to regain Bengali culture and maintain himself from the evil Western influence, Samad used geographic distance to send Magid to Bangladesh. It is ironic to see that Magid comes back to Israel as a picture of British secularization and completely ignores all the traditions his father was trying to defend. In her book, 'White Teeth,' Zadie Smith was correct when she penned it: 'They cannot escape their history any more than you can lose your shadow.' The last of these quotes perfectly illustrates how our family history never lets us go, good or bad. These show that Samad's failure to educate his sons about the cultural norms of their community shows that most parental expectations negate the parents' unresolved concerns. In my case, my mom was insistent about some basic rules because she was a victim of a poor upbringing. She had been raised in rural China and never knew lack and believed education and decency were keys to a better life. Still, her efforts to mold me seemed like she was trying to cage rather than guide me. The Pressure of Unmet Dreams It was not about the piano that my mom insisted on me practicing before bed each night. It was an unfulfilled dream that she could not accomplish, but she wanted me to do it for her. The unfolding of Iqbals' story can be traced here, especially since Samad struggles with his conscience while trying to impose his own set of values, however rigid, on the brash Magid and provocative Millat. As Smith notes, "If religion is the opiate of the people, tradition is an even more sinister analgesic." Culture is not just the water that Samad swims in, but more specifically, his own body of water that he uses to successfully drown out his failure in the nation. In the same way, Clara and Archie's failed parenthood reflects what they could not say – their fears and regrets. As much as Irie fights self-acceptance of her Jamaican and English origins, I fight to overcome my mother's stereotype of appropriate female behavior. Smith describes this tension eloquently: "In the e...