My mother (holding the doll) surrounded by her parents and two siblings

My mother was born on April 27th, 1971 to Delores and Watie Henson in Tahlequah, Oklahoma. She was the last to be born of their three children. Her brother Watie Henson Jr. was born in 1966, and her sister Martha Henson was born in 1963.

Her parents definitely practiced what Annette Lareau calls natural growth-which is the presumption that children spontaneously grow and thrive. They were hardly involved in her activities and let her roam freely. The amount of freedom they allowed my mother to have during her childhood was so great that she recalls driving her sister’s car to a town that was an hour away; my mother was only 13 years old at the time. Lareau associates the natural growth parenting style to low-income families, and my mothers childhood mirrored this. Both of her parents hardly graduated high school, and never attended college. Possibly because of this, they did not teach their children to value education and hardly made sure that they even attended school throughout the week. Her father had a stable job where he worked for over 30 years, but the job did not pay well. They were without a doubt a lower to working class family, and my mother and her siblings hardly had any toys or clothes. Her parent’s roles in the house were traditional: her mother hardly worked and spent her time cooking meals for the family and keeping the house clean, whereas her father worked long shifts, sometimes not returning home until after midnight. Their roles were so traditional that when asked about her parent’s individual contribution to housework my mother said, “Now that I think about it, they were pretty traditional. I don’t remember ever seeing my Dad cook. He never cleaned the house either, just kept up with the yard work.”

My mother, 10 years old

The main theme I found threaded throughout my mother’s interview was the lack of parental affection in her childhood. When asked the broad question, “What was your childhood like?” my mother responded with, “It was fun. I played outside all the time. There wasn’t a lot of love. I mean, I know there was love but there wasn’t a lot of affection.” Later in the interview, I asked her how close she was to her family growing up and she once again brought up the lack of affection. She said, “[We were] very close. Like, I mean- you know how close we all are. My dad didn’t show a lot of affection but I knew he loved me.” The fact that she used this question as an opportunity to bring up the amount of affection she experienced throughout her childhood shows just how much this really had an affect on her emotionally.

As we will see in the following pages, the presence of natural growth and the absence of affection in her childhood impacted the way she would one day raise her two daughters.