How good parents really are nowadays?

[vernon]

As you grow up into later adulthood

Perish the thought

 

[srw]

Ok, I give up. I see that you all have perfect children and grandchildren and no worries for their future.

Spending a couple of days with friends who have children has confirmed that mine would have been perfect little horrors. Fortunately we have a disposable income instead.

 

[vernon]

Spending a couple of days with friends who have children has confirmed that mine would have been perfect little horrors. Fortunately we have a disposable income instead.

All parents have a disposable income. Their kids have perfected the art of salvage.

 

[Tin Pot]

As played at Colcannon academy for future hoodlums, it involved two players standing face to face and throwing a knife at the opponent's feet, first one in the ambulance won.
http://strange-games.blogspot.co.uk/2007/10/split-kipper-strange-games-with-knives.html

Ah yes , now I remember - I did play that with a mate. Sometimes with a dart board behind us as a target. No ambulances but a few flesh chunks on occasion.

Catchy-knifey was another fun filled afternoon.

 

[Flying_Monkey]

I've been interested to see how my parents really don't like some of the ways in which we bring up our son. They didn't like the fact that my wife breastfed for over a year. They didn't like the fact that our son slept in the same bed as us for as long as he felt like it (and he still does sometimes, even at 6).They don't like the fact that we talk to him like he's actually got his own mind and don't just discipline him.

But he's totally okay. He's well-adjusted, bright, independent, loving and is friends with everyone at his school. I'm pretty sure if we followed my parents' recipe (discipline, followed by boarding school from 8...) that he'd end up as messed up as me. I'm spending my time as a father taking the best of what I remember of my childhood and doing the other things differently.

If he ends up having children, I hope he will remember his childhood as being a happy time and bring up his kid(s) with that in mind, not trying to avoid the bad things that his parents did.

 

[Sandra6]

I guess you can't really measure your success as a parent until you see your child as an adult with a family of their own.
I thought I'd ( we'd) done a reasonable job, all children are fairly independent when it comes to getting where they need to be with required accessories, they can cook,clean, shop etc. All bright and capable, if not entirely fulfilling their potential.
But then I discovered eldest son hadn't paid his water bill all year and doesn't have a TV licence :-(
We're all just doing the best we can.

 

[screenman]

Kids, you will always love them but sometimes not like them.

 

[rich p]

Look at me

Must I?

 

[ColinJ]

As you grow up into later adulthood, you do find yourself saying and doing things your parents did that you swore blind that you would never agree with or do.

I look increasingly like a taller version of my old man as, er, an old man, but that doesn't mean I have to act like he did at this age! He seemed desperate to stop doing things, whereas I feel desperate to start!

Perish the thought

Exactly!

Apart from spending a lot of time meeting up with people off t'Interweb to tackle unfeasibly tough hilly bicycle rides together, I am also setting up a little attic room recording studio in which to produce awful music to embarrass my non-existent children! (I think I am getting a bit old now to grow some kids of my own so I will have to make do with embarrassing my sisters' children instead! )

 

[slowmotion]

We played it as kids. The biggest knife we played with was a bowie knife but usually it was a penknife.

We played that game at the school I was at between the age of eight and eleven. The headmaster didn't mind any of us wandering about with sheath knives on our belts. Nobody died. Quite few of us ended up with broken bones from falling out of the giant cedar tree as we tried to get to the summit. The headmaster was a gunnery commander in WW2 and had a robust attitude about risk.