Self-worth?

Self-worth seems to be a hot topic in “Teenage Wasteland” by Anne Tyler. Daisy lays awake pondering it, the psychologist says that Donny needs a “better sense” of it and Cal lectures Daisy about her parenting destroying Donny’s self-esteem (37). Yet something is not quite right in all of this. Every character in this story is damaged or broken in some way or another, not a single one of these characters seems to have really mastered the concept of self-worth, none of them; the question is why?

The first step to answering that is to figure out what exactly is self-worth anyway? A laundry list might include good feelings towards oneself, being confident in oneself, and respecting oneself, which is all fine and good except have you ever noticed it is always someone else who talks about a person’s self-worth so how does the idea of self worth really apply. We all define it differently and it is often not about what we would initially list to define it. Unlike the list above it is less about one’s actually “worth” and is really about proficiency in socially acceptable and admirably field. To some it involves religion, or maybe an adherence to the idea of morals, or being physically attractive, or being sexually competent, or being intellectual, but it is really our own, personal opinions of how a person sizes up in these fields that define someone else’s self worth. We may ponder what self-worth is like Daisy does, but she doesn’t try to define it, and she definitely doesn’t apply the measurements to herself. In fact, in what the narrator lets us as readers know, Daisy doesn’t even really deal the self-worth directly, she focuses on if she in praised her son enough to instill in him a sense of self-worth but not self-worth itself. Would self-worth have fixed everything?

If Donny did have better self-worth, would that have been enough to stop the disastrous toll he took on his family, after really dissecting self-worth, would that have made him better? I personally think that self-worth was not the problem or the solution for Donny so why did Cal and the therapist site this as his problem. The easiest assumption would be that they saw him as having low self-worth by their standards, but most likely the reason they said and saw Donny as having low self-worth is because they themselves had the idea of low self-worth projected on them. With Cal you can assume that his divorce labeled him as having low self-worth, so when he then tutors dejected, troubled teenagers who have been told that they too have low self-worth they all drown each other in their apparent lack of self-worth.

It seems to become pretty apparent that, at least in this story, everyone is broken because of another someone else. Until these character can begin to define and create their own self-worth they will be stuck at the mercy of others and remain broken. (501)