The Story of Ferdinand

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The text shows that supportive parenting can significantly affect a child’s outlook on their lives, their mental health and their self-esteem. The most crucial thing parents can do is to allow children to be exactly who they are. The ability to make the home a sanctuary of security and support for the child is the single most important factor in promoting lifelong health and well- being for the child. Such an environment creates a buffer for the child from the hardships they may face outside of the home and untimely the real world as an adult. “As the years went by Ferdinad grew and grew until he was very big and strong.”(22). As the other bulls played and butted each other as normal bull do, not Ferdinand, he knows exactly who and what he is.

The Scholar Constance B. Hieatt suggests that people interpreted Ferdinand as pacifist because “he still liked to sit just quietly under the cork tree and smell the flowers” offered a Biblical allusion to Micah 4: “And he shall judge among many people, and rebuke strong nations afar and off; and they shall beat their swords into ploughshares, and their spears into pruning hooks: nation shall not lift up a sword against nation, neither shall they learn war any more. But they shall sit every man under his vine and under his fig tree.” In Ferdinand, she writes, “the fig tree is replaced by a cork tree.” Switch the context from the Bible to gender, and one might arrive at the conclusion that the book supports the choices of those who depart from - Gender Role Norms Stereotypes.

Work Cited

Leaf, Munro. The Story of Ferdinand. New York: Viking Kestrel. 1936.

Normative Social Influence

http://psychcentral.com/encyclopedia/2009/normative-social-influence

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/1252544/normative_social_influence.

Informational Social Influencehttp://www.alleydog.com/glossary/definition

(Pool, Schwegler, Theodore, & Fuchs, 2007).

Parenting and Familyhttps://www.genderspectrum.org/explore-topics/parenting-and-family

Constance Hieatt's birth name is Constance Bartlett http://www.librarything.com/author/hieattconstanceb