Blog #5

 

Books can provide a wonderful avenue for insight into life’s struggles. Adeline seems to have experienced this, as she proclaimed that books were a reprieve more welcome and real than the people and situations in her life. As explored in Chapter 5 of Help Your Child to Thrive, books and other works of fiction provide relatable characters whose struggles can be made to reflect the struggles of the readers. For Adeline, books were a way for her to immerse herself in the life of a deeply empathetic and relatable character. Fiction provided a way for her to navigate through the struggles and hardship in her life by proxy of the protagonist. Books were, in some way, a channel for empathy and resolution.

 

It is likely that Niang could have benefitted from a relatable book. She exhibits characteristics reminiscent of Narcissistic Personality Disorder, described in Help Your Child to Thrive as the desire for affirmation and reinforcement from others, an overall sense of self-importance, and the disregard for others’ feelings. Niang embodied these traits in varying degrees. For all appearances, Niang seemed to deeply desire to run the household her way. She went to great measures to ensure that everyone in the household answered to her, and those who didn’t adhere to her desires were made miserable. In addition to this, she seemed to covet positive attention from people, and it appeared as though she went to certain lengths to inspire envy from others. However, her desire for positive reinforcement for others came at the cost of a disregard for other people’s emotions, as seen both in the way she seemed to blatantly manipulate her step family into turning against each other and in the way she punished and humiliated Adeline openly in front of Adeline’s peers.