The story “Roller Skates” written by Ruth Sawyer talks about a girl Lucinda riding her roller skates to explore New York, making friends, and learning new things. Lucinda grows up in a family with strict rules and wants to roller skate. When Lucinda is ten, her parents travel to Italy and leave her to stay with Miss Peters, a teacher with great faith in children. Lucinda experiences a year as an ”orphan”, getting all the freedom she wants. Living with Miss Peters, Lucinda experiences unprecedented freedom, and gets to explore New York with her roller skates. However, Aunt Emily feels it is inappropriate for a young woman to travel the city with roller skates. While doing so, Lucinda meets tons of new friends from different social backgrounds who enrich her life with warm friendships and has new adventures everyday to understand the real world. Later, Lucinda experiences the concept of death when two of her friends, Princess Zayda and Trinket, died. Finally Lucinda’s parents come back and take her.
Adults should have some faith in children to let them experience life and not be overprotected, rather than put them in a world of restrictions. Each child should be given the opportunity by their parents to develop the capacity to understand and face challenges of life. Miss Peters is “a person of great understanding, no nonsense, and no interference.” She gives Lucinda freedom and lets her experience all kinds of things on her own as long as she can be responsible for what she does. In contrast, the self-righteous Aunt Emily wants to train Lucinda to be a lady with “social graces”. What Lucinda feels and acts can relate to any 10-year-old child who wants to have his own freedom rather than always being restricted by his parents. Parents, for the sake of “protecting kids”, sometimes set up a lot of limitations that might lead children into more troubles. A free child is a happy child. When adults, like Miss Peters, give children appropriate freedom, children, like Lucinda, will stop doing disagreeable things and become independent and capable of many things, even though the freedom might occasionally lead to troubling events. Indeed, with appropriate freedom, kids are capable of much more than what adults typically ask for, exploring all kinds of things in the society, and becoming a better person.
Making friends with a number of friends from different social classes would enrich a person’s life and contribute to the maturity of a person. A person could make friends with people whether people are around his age or not because people with different ages see things differently and a person could benefit many from them. Lucinda makes many adult friends, such as the Italian fruit seller, a Patrolman M’Gonegal, an Irish cab driver, Aunt Emily’s new husband Uncle Earl, mysterious Asian “princess”, a homeless Rag-and-Bottles man, and many others. She also has playmates around her age, including Tony at the fruit stand and Trinket the neighbor's daughter. Lucinda runs into many colorful characters in New York City she never met before while growing up in a family with many restrictions. Those distinctive characters who work on different social levels represent a wide variety of ethnic, social, and age groups. When Lucinda interacts with them, she is given the opportunities to open her eyes and understand the social reality from others’ points of view. This not only enriches Lucinda’s life with warm friendships but also contributes to the development of Lucinda becoming a better person. Children should be given the opportunity to meet a variety of people with different ages from a variety of social groups to gain many new perspectives which would shape them to become a more mature person.
Death may separate people and their loved ones physically but not spiritually because people will always have great memories about loved ones living forever in their hearts. Even though the facts of death are somewhat difficult to explain to young kids, adults should try to acknowledge young kid’s inner strength and their capability to cope with the truth. The facts about Princess Zayda’s murder or Trinket’s death due to illness are not kept from Lucinda. The hotel manager and Uncle Earle sensitively handle and explain Lucinda the facts of death. No matter the hotel managers or Uncle Earle, they all talk about death with 10-year-old Lucinda with great sensitivity, accepting her grief and confusion patiently. This stabilizes Lucinda’s feelings and gives her a sense of family security. Slowly, Lucinda comes to understand that love transcends all barriers, even death. The happy memories of a good friend or loved one can still live in people’s hearts. Children are not as weak as adults think. Children, in fact, are capable of understanding death and coping with it, as long as adults can handle death with great sensitivity and care.
The book Roller Skates is a very touching story that people, especially parents, can learn from. The author tries to convey three issues: freedom, friendship, and death. Giving young people the freedom to explore reality is very essential as kids learn things best by doing and seeing them and reflecting on the mistakes they have made, rather than just told by their parents. With such freedom, young people get to meet colorful characters who function on different social levels, which helps kids gain new perspectives and develop a mature mind. To cope with death, young people’s inner strengths are much more than adults typically think. Adults should absolutely sensitively and carefully handle the scenes of sadness with kids to help them accept the truth and clarify their confusion about death.
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