Parents Influence On Children

When two people decide to have a child, either knowingly or unknowingly, they make a vow to raise that child to the best of their abilities. While some parents are wonderful, loving, proud parents some are hurtful, abusive both physically or mentally, or just down right evil the impact they have is immense and will determine many aspects of the child and the way he/she lives out the rest of his/her life. In my life I have both kinds of parents, my mother is the most caring, loving, proud parent I know; while my father is very abusive and hateful towards me and this has had a tremendous effect on me.

Throughout the years my mother has always been there for me and has been the one true positive factor in my life. She left my father with a 7 year old and two 3 year old children making $4.75 an hour at Walgreen's. She has always defended me and helped me do many things I would not have been able to do without her help. Her love and devotion has fought many battles against my father and schools that did not care about the student but only test scores. It hasn't always been easy and many years were spent with sometimes just enough money to eat, but through it all she has been a strong beacon of hope.

On the other side of life is my father, he was a man who I believed may have loved my mom at one point but he was abusive, he was an adulterer, and just down right evil. He spent many years with at his peak four girlfriends plus my mother and still trying to get more. He spent a lot of time yelling at my family telling us how useless we were and how we needed him to live and we believed it for several years, even after my parents divorced he still took out anger and abuse on my siblings and me. He drove me to depression and such low self esteem from years of abuse because I used to take a lot of

the abuse to protect my brother and sister so they wouldn't have to go through what I did. While this worked for sometime he eventually got to my brother and sister but my mother and I were able to shield them and put a stop to my father by moving far away to where he couldn't find us.

These two very different parenting techniques have shaped me in a dramatic way. Throughout the years I have had several years of therapy, two suicide attempts and numerous self esteem and depression issues. The only thing I can say saved me was my mother, without I would have been in a very bad state of affairs and probably not alive today. The way I am today comes from