The relationship between parents and their children

Parents. At times you hate them, at times you love them. A child will have its ups and downs with the parents but one thing is for certain: Parents have(or don't have) a huge impact on the way their children are raised and eventually molded into adults. The Westing Game goes deep into the relationship between parents and their children several times in the detective novel.
Lets start out with one of the main parent to child relationship, in this case mother to daughter. Mrs. Wexler throughout the book is a quite frankly an unhappy, miserable mother and wife. It seems that she is trying to live her life through one of her daughters, Angela. Pause it. How many time in life do we see parents try and live their lives through their children. Whether it be trying to get them to try out for the dance team or the basketball team, parents do this all the time. In this case, Angela really wants to go to medical school and become a doctor, but her mother, Grace, wants her to just marry a doctor. So now the mother is telling her what she can and cant do from a occupation standpoint, but also maybe intruding on what she wants from her marriage. Its quite obvious that Grace is(whether its right or wrong) living through Angela.
Now the other daughter, Turtle is getting ignored by her mother throughout and is no where near the child Angela is. Of course, later in the book, we come to find out that Turtle is a brilliant, millionaire, lawyer. During the entire path of her childhood, Turtle was able to do as she pleased. Her mind was able to wonder where it wanted, feeling no pressure from her mother. Angela on the other hand, felt a ton of pressure as she was "The Chosen One" in her mothers eyes.
The other main parent-child relationship is Mr. Hoo and his son, Doug. Doug is a track star who can go very far in life using his athletic abilities to his advantage(i.e. scholarships, Olympics, etc.) Father doesn't see it this way as he really is not that supportive of his son. Doug shows a lot of interest in track and doesn't want to focus on a lot of other things in his life such as the restaurant or his studies. Mr. Hoo does come around and cheer him on towards the end in some of Doug's races. Hoo was a little hard on Doug but Hoo did say that if it wasn't for him, "he'd do nothing but run." Doug says in a post-race interview that he "owes it all to his dad." Mr. Hoo installed good values into Doug and he used those values to be a good track star.
The Westing Game does give us a good look into three, solid relationships between a parent and their child. It is easy to analyze the relationships and compare them to maybe what we experience or know about parents and the way they raise their children.