Personal Narrative: My Early Literacy Development

Between the ages of five and eight I resided in a predominately white, suburban, affluent community in upstate New York. My early literacy skills and development were impacted in a multitude of ways due to my immersion in a traditional family, with a stay at home mother and working father who parented authoritatively. As the provider of the family with a superiority complex, my father did not always provide kind ways of speaking, and valued a close knit family, using the close proximity of the Adirondacks to strengthen literacy development and cognitive strategies through questioning, researching, and gaining first-hand experience from outdoor activities. From my early childhood experience, the socioeconomic, sociocultural, and environmental …show more content…
While my father was a wonderful provider and hard worker, he created an environment where he encouraged us to be passive, resist questioning authority, strive for perfection and accept nothing less. While my siblings and myself were encouraged to speak and read often, our ideas always needed to be in agreement with our father, not allowing us to create an identity separate from his. I was reluctant to make eye contact with adults. Expressive language was halted as I was unsure of how to express my thoughts in fear of being yelled at as well as receptive language where I unsure of understanding others thoughts. Gender would often play into these types of interactions, with my father making negative comments such as, "you swing like a girl." These ideas begin to cloud a child's mind and intellectual capabilities as they grow. When my brother was six, my dad asked him what he wanted to be when he grew up. My brother replied, "a scientist," to which my dad said, "you have to be good in math." My brother said he was. My dad asked him an addition fact and he got it wrong. My dad responded, "well I guess you can't be a scientist." While I cannot recall any specific interactions from when I was this age. these conversations were normal. My metacognitive learning was engaged as I acknowledged these behaviors and critiqued them, as well as my own thoughts. I developed my theory of mind as I started to understand the intentions of my father and was able to predict his behavior when I would make him agitated. Through the way in which my parents spoke with me, I listened more, spoke less out of fear of being ostracized and coming across as intellectually inadequate, furthering impacting language