Akeelah and the Bee:
A Developmental Critique
Le-Rica Gayle-Mitchell
Brock University
Throughout a persons life, they have an expectation or goal to fulfil. Where these are set by our caregiver and society as a baby, or by oneself and peers while growing up, there are stages in life when one is expected to have accomplished a given task by a certain age. The theory for many of these developmental stages have been around for years, circulating and changing concepts along the way. I feel that the perfect movie which demonstrates many of these life changes is Akeelah and the Bee (Doug Atchison, 2006). The movie is about an eleven year old girl named Akeelah who was raised in South Los Angeles. Akeelah was determined to get…show more content… After analyzing Akeelah and the Bee, it is clear that come of the children in this film begin by having some hardships with adults, and in the end, there is a regathering of feelings and relationships are built. Akeelah's youngest brother, Terrence, had a low tolerance when it came to adults and authority. When Terrence would come home late at night after being missing for a couple of says, his mother would be really upset and he would ignore everything she is saying. I feel that the relationship between the mother and son is the way it is, because when he was younger he was not given the love and affection that one needs to grow emotionally. Terrence went out looking for other things to stimulate his emotions, which led to drugs and weapons. It may also be that Terrence's social experiences later on shaped his thought, feelings and behaviours towards his life (Seth D. Pollak, 2014, p. 54). Now, with Akeelah, her interactions with adults is reasonable for her age. Akeelah has trust and builds firm attachments with adults, but when she feels betrayed she will completely remove that trust until there is an understanding. For instance, Akeelah and her mother would get along fine, but when her mother told her that she was not allowed to compete in the spelling bee and completely shunned the entire idea of it, Akeelah removed that relationship that they had.…show more content… The children who came from Crenshaw, a more underprivileged area of Los Angeles, were looked looked down on and often went on without their skills being acknowledged. An example of this situation is before Akeelah had entered the spelling bee, nobody had recognized her spelling abilities. She went on living life as another African-American student that skips classes and does not hand in assignments. It was more like, once you live in an area you were automatically stereotyped. When Akeelah had shown up at the spelling bee, the judge was handing her her number and was showed to know that she was from Crenshaw and participating in the spelling bee (Atchison, D., 2006). As for the students living on the other side of Los Angeles, they were seen as preppy smart children who got everything they have ever wanted or needed. For these views, it is mainly the adults that see these differences between the students. The children and youth typically see everyone the same, just thinking that the ones who have it worked harder for it. One exception is Akeelah's brother, Terrence, who seen these differences so he lived by societies views. Terrence ran into Akeelah studying for the spelling bee and he asked her why she is trying to be like the “white” people (Atchison, D., 2006). With these societal views, i feel that it places more of a struggle on the