Understood Drunkle… Unfortunately most parenting when your kids become school age, and I cannot speak from experience cuz mine are still toddlers, probably consists of undoing alot of the bad things kids pick up from their friends in the environments at school or just from hanging out with other friends. So your point about sending them to a boarding school may be valid for that reason. I look back at my own childhood and in no way shape or form will I allow my kids to grow up doing the things that I did. I was much to unsupervised. I am hoping that will make me a better parent today. However, I can remember lots of arguments that my parents had, a totally screwed up sister, lots of drugs in the family with my brothers and stuff… all kinds of unmentionables… I don’t know if boarding school would have helped.. In reality, I think exposure to that stuff helped me understand it alot more. I don’t know it is hard to describe. I do know that there are times when having the family physically there near you, loving them and hating their guts at the same time, was important in retrospect. I went to UCSD and turned out okay. Do I think all families are as f’d up as mine was… I doubt it but I bet there are plenty of those out there who had their share of family fun. Hey you love your family for the good and the bad right?
Like you I want my kid to be better then me. I think I can raise them to be that way. If I had a transitional job or a situation where I didn’t believe I could spend alot of time with them then no I would not have had kids to begin with. I think that the upbringing you had would result in your own parenting to be top notch. The fact that you would not even think of bringing a child into this world unless you had an ideal situation speaks volumes of your parenting abilities already.
