Parents who are selfish have a big effect on children. The way children are raised all depends on the parents. If they aren’t a good parent to your children and let selfishness get in the way of raising their children the right way it can have a large impact on the children’s lives in the future. When becoming a parent your job then becomes being a parent first over everything. Having a family means you do everything you can for the family even if it involves putting other things before your personal wants and desires. The Glass Castle by Jeannette Walls is a perfect example of selfishness in parents having a large affect on their children in the long run. The Glass Castle isn’t just a story but it is someone’s actual life that was affected by selfish parents. The story is told by Jeannette Walls and is the story of her life and the ups and downs that she went through as a child with troubled parents and how it affected her life. Jeannette was the middle child out of four siblings. She had an older sister Lori, a younger brother Brian, a younger sister Maureen, an alcoholic father and a mother who was only focused on perusing her dream of becoming and artist. The selfishness started at an early age with Jeannette and her parents. Jeannette was three years old when she was alone in her kitchen in a trailer park in Arizona, standing on a chair cooking hotdogs over a stove when next thing she knew she was on fire. Her father was not home and her mother was in the other room distracted and working on one of her paintings. She was only three years old and her mother who should have been watching her small child was too busy working on a painting to notice that her daughter was over a stove cooking her food. The father was not home and when Rosemary Walls heard her daughter yelling and saw her in flames she wrapped her up and ran to the neighbors' to call for help. Jeannette was hospitalized with severe burns. The nurses questioned why a three year old was left alone cooking over a stove with no supervision. Rex and Mary Walls knew the nurses were asking questions and did not want to pay for a medical bill so they claimed that Jeannette did not need the hospital to get better, then they picked her up and ran out of the hospital without looking back while the nurses tried to stop them. It was irresponsible of them to take their daughter with severe burns out of the hospital without having the nurse’s permission. The parents were only thinking of themselves and how this would effect them; they were not thinking of their daughter. The parents' selfishness also impacted in the way the children were raised. The family was living in a town called Battle Mountain. The mother, Rosemary Walls, had a teaching job at the Battle Mountain Intermediate School. Rex Walls was unemployed and they lived in a run down house with barely any food or clothes for the children. They were staying in the desert sleeping under the stars before Rosemary got the job at the school where the children were also enrolled. Rosemary believed that rules and discipline held people back and believed the best way to let children