Overview of the movie precious

Precious is a 16-year-old black illiterate teenage girl who lives her life under the constant of sexual, verbal, and physical abuse from her parents. Precious doesn’t feel any love coming from her parents so she tries to love herself by coming up with fantasies inside her head. With all the constant abuse, her coping mechanism is eating and a lack of friends to help and support her, Precious becomes critically obese. She, although obese and uses food as a coping mechanism sometimes goes without food because her mother is negligent, during one of her instances of hunger Precious stole food from a restaurant desperately. She holds a lot of anger and resentment and she would often take it out on classmates.

After Precious was impregnated by her father she didn’t attend school but one of her teachers reached out to her and helped send her to an alternative school. At the alternative school, she met another teacher, Ms. Rain, who eventually helped Precious overcome her struggles through self-determination. At the end of the movie, her mother reached out to a social worker in hopes to reunite the family again. The meeting was held and Precious did not look back and she walked with her two children away from her mother. The ecological system is a perspective on human development that considers all influences from the various contexts of development which are microsystem, mesosystem, exosystem and etc. Bronfenbrenner believed that a person’s development was affected by everything in their surrounding.

In the movie Precious, her parents and her school are parts of the microsystem that are the closest to her life and have the most direct contact with her. Precious was affected by the school because they did not give her a chance to learn properly if the school would have given Precious direct one on one contact she would have been a lot more advanced than what she was. Fundamentals that she would’ve learned when she became older and help her to develop different skill and appropriate behavior were missed out on. Precious parents did have a parenting style they were strict and demanding. This created Precious’ to be withdrawn and fearful of her family and others. She lives in a poor and low-class neighborhood She doesn’t work and lives on welfare Precious is an overweight 16-year-old teenager who finds herself in the habit of overeating and cooking unhealthy food. She didn’t have any friends or boyfriends but she lives with her mother who hates her and beats her most of the time and her father who was rape.