Despite their challenges we see the Walls’ children grasp normalcy?, success? in this section of the book. Why, despite everything – money, housing, are these children able to pick up and move across the country to obtain standard housing and work and seemingly start over again? Could it be resilience? According to Robert J. Sternberg in the The Retention Agenda, studies out of Stanford University “have found that self-efficacy is one of the best positive predictors of success in any working environment.” They say students must not only, “have the knowledge and skills to succeed, but also a mindset whereby they believe in their own potential to succeed.”
Why do you think Lori, Brian and Jeanette were able to find their way in New York?
SJU Reads 
I think the key to Lori, Brian, and Jeanette’s success and growth as individuals in New York was from their sheer determination to make a future for themselves that was brighter than their cycle of poverty. New York was the Glass Castle for the children, as it held the most prosper and hope in their eyes and they knew that if they did not leave their current living conditions, that they would be stuck in a rut of constant simplicity and poverty. The children dreamed of a complex way of living embellished without worry, and they found that in New York.
I found it interesting how Lori, Brian, and Jeanette were able to make happy and successful lives for themselves, while Maureen struggled.
I think that the way that the Walls parents gave their children no choice but to learn to fend for themselves helped the children to develop the skills that they later used in New York.
However, there are certain things that a parent must provide for their children. I feel like at the beginning of the book (though this might have just been Jeanette’s perspective as a younger kid), Rex was less drunk and her parents helped her to have the proper education (teaching them to read, etc) and food and shelter so that she was able to develop the basic skills to survive in the world. These are extremely important, and even though you could argue that giving children lots of freedom is beneficial to their independence, we can see lots of examples throughout The Glass Castle where we stop and think that the parents really need to be move involved.
Maureen was brought up less by her family and more by the families in the Welch neighbourhood. She never had to dig through garbage for food, work to be able to buy clothes, or budget the money she was able to find. Although the extent to which the other Walls children had to take care of themselves probably wasn’t okay, and was not necessary to help them survive later in life, Maureen had a problem that I think a lot of us probably will have when we get to university – being taken care of to the extent that we don’t know how to take care of ourselves. Luckily SJU has programs like the cooking classes that will help us develop these skills, but Maureen was not so fortunate.
I think that the key to success here is the ability to be guided by supportive and loving parents to develop the independence to survive on one’s own. Although the Walls parents were not supportive or responsible a lot of the time, they gave just enough to help their children live successful lives.
I believe that the older children were able to survive and even become successful once they arrived in NewYork due to the hardships they faced when they were young. The older children spent their entire childhood moving from place to place and scavenging to survive. Once they became teenagers they still faced the issue of finding food and still had to raise themselves. The older children constantly had to protect themselves and their siblings, and although it is not the ideal way to grow up, it did cause them to be self sufficient and successful. The hard times they faced and their will to succeed propelled them forward later in life. The youngest never experienced any of the hardships of self sufficiency due to the fact that they were in one location as she grew up and the neighbours raised her. She never had to do anything for herself and therefore she was unable to survive once she was in NewYork and left to stand on her own two feet. I believe that although it was an unbelievably hard life for the older kids in the Walls family it did cause them to be able to survive and succeed no matter where they ended up.
I believe that what brings the Walls children to move to New York is an unusual thing. The very upbringing that is so uncertain and requires the children to always be self-reliant, to the point of causing the children to fear their lives in certain scenarios and flee their home, has made Lori, Jeanette and Brian so resilient and adaptable to survive and flourish in their new environments. It is a sort of “chicken or the egg,” “cause and effect” scenario in which the good of the Walls children’s upbringing stems from the bad. As Evy mentioned, Maureen seemed to have gotten the worse end of the deal, although it seemed ideal at the time when she was spending time away from their broken family. She still was influenced by the broken family but did not receive the same “resilience training” from the situation.