Role Of Parents Essay

2015 Words9 Pages

Parents. Immediately words like loving, caring, fair, nurturing, dependable, best friend, come to mind when thinking of what a parent is. One word that doesn’t come to mind is immoral. Parents are supposed to be there for their children and teach them valuable life lessons of morality and help their child establish their own moral code. Not be a demonstration of immorality to their impressionable children. However, that is exactly how the parents in Less Than Zero behave. To describe them as parents is wrong they are merely the biological producers of children as they are more concerned with themselves and consumed by materialism than looking after their drug addicted children. Kim’s mom for example, cares more about her next upcoming film …show more content…

One would think that a mother would be eager to spend time with her son who just returned from four months away at college, but not Clay’s mom. When Clay asked his mother to come with him to lunch he says, “I had asked my mother to come, but she said that she was busy. She was lying out by the pool reading Glamour magazine when I asked her to come, (144).” Clay’s mom has completely neglected her only son, claiming to be “busy” when she is only reading a magazine. This demonstrates the extent to which Clay’s mother sees her role as only providing financial support to her son. It is as if his mother doesn’t care or love her son enough to go out to lunch with him and that she thinks giving him money is good enough. She doesn’t know what it truly means to be a mother. Critic Nicki Sahlin, commented on the situation by writing,
“The parents ' failure to provide a firm foundation establishes visible sources, if not excuses, for the younger generation 's shortcomings. That these characters are virtually abandoned by their parents, while hardly registering the fact consciously, accounts for some of their more generalized feelings of anxiety and malaise. Stereotypically spoiled in material terms, they are nevertheless neglected emotionally,

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