Analysis Of The Movie "Boyz N The Hood"

Categories: Film Analysis

The movie Boyz n The Hood is about Tre and Doughboy’s family and how their family dynamic affected their life. Family does play a big part in a child’s development and they are your support system through everything. The way you are brought up will affect you when you get older. Their childhood development has a huge impact on who they are now and how they act. Tre is more mindful, he thinks about situations and even though he’s in the heat of the moment, he will stop and think about what his father told him.

Doughboy is the total opposite, he would do it on the spot and say what comes to mind, he is more involved in gang violence and drugs whereas Tre is not. Using their family structure, parenting styles, environmental circumstances, and family subsystems, this will explain how their childhood and family has affected their growth and personality. The relationship between Doughboy and his mother is different from his brother’s relationship with his mother.

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Doughboy would always be lectured, and his mother would tell him “you ain’t shit”, would call him fat and would continuously put him down. She would prioritize his brother Ricky more than him, and that took a toll on him. His mother distanced herself and put a barrier between her and Doughboy and that affected him later in life. Since the relationship between them is distant the way Doughboy treats the girls around his neighbourhood is the same way his mother treated him.

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Albert Bandura’s theory of observational learning can be applied to Doughboy and the way he acts. This theory talks about how children tend to notice and observe their parents’ actions and imitate it whenever they are not around (Rathus & Longmuir, 2012). Tre on the other hand has a good relationship with father and mother, he can talk to his father about certain things and due to having a father figure in his life, it has provided him a skill of understanding the good and the consequences of his actions. His father would be there to protect him like the incident on his first night with him and the burglar, and when the police officer tried to say hi to him, his dad told him to back inside. Having a dad and having this close connection with him made him more mature than some of his friends. His relationship with his mother is good and the fact that he gets scared of his mother on the phone shows that their relationship is balanced between strict and laid back at the same time. Parenting styles between these two families are very different. The two types of parenting styles that are evident in this movie is authoritative, and authoritarian. Authoritative is when a parent is highly restrictive, but support and love their children, while authoritarian is more do what I say, and you have no say in it, very strict and no signs of love or emotions are involved (Rathus & Longmuir, 2012). Tre’s dad is more authoritative, strict but loving at the same time. He wants his son to do what he says like when he was asked to clean, he did it, but he spends time with his son to bond and talk about things that his mother would not talk to him about like sex. When Tre wanted to get revenge for Ricky, his father talked him out of going out and being like Doughboy and his friend Chris who is in the wheelchair, and that stopped Tre from doing anything and hugged his father.

During the movie when Tre snuck out and went with Doughboy and his friends to get revenge he asked Doughboy if he could get out of the car, and he walked him. He knew he was getting himself into something that his father was trying to prevent him from and he was in deep thought and that caused him to wake up and get out of the car before he gets himself involved with the police. On the other hand, Doughboy who was raised in an authoritarian household is more outgoing and more violent than Tre. He got involved with drugs and gang violence because of the parenting style between his mom and him. His mother never really cared about how he feels or how he is, she would normally just lash out on him and tell him to do this and do that, and that has caused him to act out all the time. When Doughboy went to jail for stealing when he was young, his mother did not really care about him going to jail. The mom blamed Doughboy for Ricky’s death even though he was on the way to protect his brother, and this caused him to go out and kill the men who killed his brother. When Doughboy would disregard his mother and would not listen to her, he disregarded the rules and the boundaries that his mother was trying to put in place.

Children who disregards the rules resulted from a childhood with no boundaries. The parenting styles have both affected these two young men in their development, but their environmental circumstances also takes a toll in their development. The environmental circumstance that they are in is also a big part of how it affected their development. In the beginning of the movie when the burglar scene happened, they called the police right after the incident, it took them an hour to get there and they stopped by a donut shop to get food before going to them. The shootings that happen in their neighbourhood are not accounted for, and police men do not really care about it and they would rather attend another incident. Even though both Doughboy and Tre grew up in the same environment, their internal environment is what differentiates them.

The environmental circumstance that Doughboy is involved in is more violent than Tre. Tre is more focused on other things like making sure he is not involved into anything that would upset his father or get his mother worried. Tre does not like getting involved with violence, and his girlfriend jumps whenever she hears gunshots, Tre looks around when he hears the chopper above his house. Doughboy does not seem to mind everything that is going on since he is used to it, he always has a gun ready if anything happens, he is okay with facing other gangs and telling them off. That one scene in the movie where they were in the streets and Doughboy called the other girl a bitch and caused a commotion, but he did not care if it would start a fight.

Works cited

  1. Bandura, A. (1977). Social learning theory. Englewood Cliffs, N.J: Prentice Hall.
  2. Boyz n the Hood. (1991). Directed by John Singleton. United States: Columbia Pictures.
  3. Baumrind, D. (1991). The influence of parenting style on adolescent competence and substance use. Journal of Early Adolescence, 11(1), 56-95.
  4. Lamborn, S. D., Mounts, N. S., Steinberg, L., & Dornbusch, S. M. (1991). Patterns of competence and adjustment among adolescents from authoritative, authoritarian, indulgent, and neglectful families. Child development, 62(5), 1049-1065.
  5. Rathus, S. A., & Longmuir, A. (2012). Childhood and adolescence: Voyages in development. Cengage Learning.
  6. Sameroff, A. J., & Chandler, M. J. (1975). Reproductive risk and the continuum of caretaking casualty. Review of child development research, 4(1), 187-244.
  7. Stewart, A. J., & McDermott, C. (2004). Gender in psychology. Annual review of psychology, 55(1), 519-544.
  8. Whiting, B. B. (1975). The Development of Social Cognition: An Ecological Analysis. University of Michigan Press.
  9. Wilson, W. J. (1987). The truly disadvantaged: The inner city, the underclass, and public policy. University of Chicago Press.
Updated: Feb 02, 2024
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Analysis Of The Movie "Boyz N The Hood". (2024, Feb 11). Retrieved from https://studymoose.com/analysis-of-the-movie-boyz-n-the-hood-essay

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