Friday's Expectations

High expectations from parents can make their kids feel pressured to give up, fail , or it can make them feel motivated. In The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan and Friday Night Lights by Bissinger, Jing Mei and Mike feel pressured that they have to live up to their parents high expectations. While Jing-Mei takes the pressure badly and feels that she has to give up, Mike feels motivated to live up to his dad's high expectations.

In the chapter“Two Kinds” in The Joy Luck Club, Jing Mei has high expectations from her mother to be a child prodigy. “Every night after dinner my mother and I would sit at the Formica kitchen table. She would present new test, taking her examples from stories of amazing children she had read in Ripley's Believe It Or Not, Good House Keeping, or Reader's Digest….”(Tan 133). Jing mei’s mother had high expectations for her to be like the kids that she read about in magazines or watched on TV. Unfortunately, for Jing Mei, the pressure was too much to handle, and

“So now on nights when my mother presented her test, I performed listlessly, my head propped on one arm. I pretended to be bored. And I was” (Tan,135).Because of all the pressure, she decided to give up on trying to exceed her mother’s expectations, and hoped her mother would give up on her. In Friday Night Lights mike also felt his dad’s expectations while he was playing on the field. Instead of giving up like Jing Mei did,he took it as a time to feel motivated and do better. “ He became the stuff of legend, with twenty-seven pitches in a row for strikes, a single season where he hit thirty home runs” (Bissinger, 75).Although he felt pressure like Jing-mei, he took the pressure of his dad to be motivated and to try his best. When his dad died, he lost his confidence, so his dad's expectations was what kept him trying his