Friday Night Lights: A Synthesis Essay

In Amy Tan’s The Joy Luck Club, from “Two Kinds” and in Bissinger’s Friday Night Lights, the outcome of parents expectations of their children is perfectly portrayed. When a child is pressured to live up to their parents expectations, they become stressed. In most cases, this leads to failure because the child feels as if they will never be able to please the parent. In other cases it leads to the child cracking under pressure and being too anxious to complete the task at hand, or the child might use the stress to motivate them and succeed. The problem is that the last outcome is very seldom, but parents always think that that’s what will happen. In both pieces of work, a parent pushes a child to succeed in something that the child is unsure
After Jing Mei and her mother both gave up on Jing Mei becoming a prodigy, her mother told her that she “could been genius…” and that she “just not trying…” (Tan, 143). This shows that all that time the Jing Mei thought her mother wanted her to be something different than what she was, she really just wanted her to try and do her best at everything she could. Though she went about it the wrong way, Jing Mei’s mother always meant well. A similar problem occurs with Mike and his father Billy in Friday Night Lights. Mike’s father treasured Mike more than anything, even his brother tells him that he was “the most special thing in his life” (Bissinger, 74). Billy always pushed Mike to be his best, telling him he had to go to college, and how much he wanted him to play for Permian. After Billy’s death, however, Mike wanted to leave Odessa, and Joe Bill talked him out of it, using the “power of Permian football” (Bissinger, 74) to make him stay. This shows that where Mike found his father’s wishes a tough thing to do, Billy always meant well. Mike stressed over trying to make his father proud, but all Billy really wanted to do is give Mike incentive to trying to be