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case study -question at bottom Trixie is a white…
case study -question at bottom
Trixie is a white 15-year-old, the daughter of divorced parents. She spends alternate weekends at her father’s house, but most of the time lives with her mother Monica, her 11-year-old sister Millie, and her 10-year-old brother Max. Her father Jeb has remarried and lives with his second wife Patti and Patti’s 7-year-old son Louis. Both parents are upper-middle class and live in fairly affluent suburban neighborhoods. Trixie is beginning to dislike the weekends at her father’s house because he lives so far from Trixie’s friends, and because he doesn’t spend much time with her. She also strongly dislikes Patti and Louis and seems to resent their presence in her father’s life. Patti has three Siamese cats, and Trixie’s asthma is a problem when she is at their house.
When Jeb first started dating Patti 5 years ago, Trixie liked her. Patti was “cool” and talked to Trixie about sex and drinking and drugs. This was quite different from Monica, Trixie’s mother, who has been very hesitant to discuss these things. Patti was able to answer many of the questions that Trixie was too embarrassed to ask her mother. Since her father’s marriage to Patti, though, Trixie becomes angry when Patti “tries to act like her mother”. For example, when Patti offered to take Trixie to the doctor for birth control pills, Trixie exploded in a fit of anger. “Why does she think I’m even having sex?” she screamed. “She’s not my mother. She has no right to interfere in my life.” (Trixie’s mother, by the way, has never spoken to her daughter about birth control.)
Trixie is actually not having intercourse, although she has been going with her boyfriend Ramon for a little over a year. He is a year older and sometimes expects her to do things she is not comfortable doing. For example, he recently has been asking her to perform oral sex on him; they have also been at parties where alcohol and marijuana have been offered to them. Trixie often wonders if she is the only person in her school who is still a virgin and who is not drinking or doing drugs. She feels very self-conscious about this and thinks it is just a matter of time before she is forced to give in to these pressures in order to maintain her popularity.
She is fairly popular at this point. She is in the school’s award-winning show choir and is highly regarded by her peers for having a good deal of musical and dance talent. Up until last year she was the co-captain of the drill team and a valued player on the girls’ basketball team. Trixie’s pre-adolescent growth spurt came early, as did puberty. Her height, especially her long legs, gave her an advantage over many of the other basketball players and dancers. All of this physical activity contributed to keeping her weight low. Since she quit basketball and drill team, though, she believes that she needs to eat much less in order to “keep the fat off”. She rarely eats breakfast and often has little or nothing for lunch. In spite of early puberty, she has small breasts. She has unfortunately inherited her father’s dark and thick body hair (underarms and legs).
Trixie wants a tattoo (she wants her boyfriend’s name tattooed on her shoulder), but her mother has flatly refused to allow this until Trixie turns 18. Recently she came home from a party with her tongue pierced, and Monica grounded her for a week.
Trixie has a best friend that she has been close to since early childhood. This friend is now pregnant, and Trixie is beginning to consider what it would be like to have a baby of her own. Her friend shares all the excitement as well as the challenges of impending motherhood with her, and Trixie believes that she is getting a pretty clear picture of the experience. Her mother, though, worries that Trixie does not see the down side, such as the responsibilities, the financial challenges, the limitations motherhood would put on her social life, the difficulties in finishing school, and so on.
In school Trixie is generally a B student. She likes to read (especially the Twilight series and similar books), but has always thought of herself as challenged in math. Now that she is a sophomore, she is struggling with Geometry and Biology. Her mother is very strict about homework time, and Trixie sometimes gets help from her in completing math assignments. (Monica is an accountant). Trixie thinks very linearly; she finds it difficult to understand things that are not real to her (including geometry figures and complex biological concepts). She works hard, though, and can usually get fairly good grades just through effort. Sometimes she complains that her memory for school work is not as good as it should be.
Trixie used to think she wanted to be an accountant like her mother, but has come to realize that all that math would be sheer torture for her. Now she is considering studying creative writing when she gets to college, but is not at all sure of this as a goal.
Two things have happened to Trixie in the past month that have caused her a good deal of continuous stress. First, she has come to the conclusion that there is no God, and she refuses to go to church with her mother. (Her father and stepmother do not force or even encourage her to go on weekends when she is with them.) This causes regular arguments, and Trixie is torn between wanting to keep the peace and wanting to be true to her own convictions. Secondly, her boyfriend Ramon has been pressuring her to do homework assignments for him. She has done a few of them because she is afraid he will think badly of her if she doesn’t. But she knows that her mother and her teachers will lose respect for her if she gets caught. She is not sure how to cope with either of these two situations.
If Trixie suddenly moved to a poorer urban neighborhood with more ethnic mix, how might this affect her? What things in her life are most influenced by her upper-middle class suburban background?
