Kathy,

Your assumption is safe yes. Those days are long gone. With one in college
and the other entering senior year, it is time I focus on having an adult
father/son, father/daughter relationship and just forget the past lol. I do
have to say however, because we were a bit firm, responsible, hard, strict,
or whatever you call it, we've received some many compliments on how well
behaved and respectful our kids are. I think  there was a fear of losing
that by easing up too much, and since these compliments started as young
kids, it naturally was the thing to keep doing. It isn't that no
encouragement is given, there is not starvation there but weighted much
towards  the responsible side of life. I've always been up front and told
the kids just the way things were, as if they were adults, explaining why a
punishment was coming, explaining why I did this or that, and even
apologizing to them if I wronged them, although I am their parent. It can
be difficult to not try to impose my accumulated knowledge from my mistakes
upon my kids being a, mature gent shall I say lol, when they are still
teenagers.

Brad




Kathy Du Bois wrote:
>Oh Brad,
>I know what you mean better than you can imagine.  I could have written
>your last post.  Greg and I were overly critical of our two oldest boys,
>Chris and Matt and we know that we are now having to do a lot of repare
>work.  One of the things that helped us in our course correction was
>having two more children.  We've parented Liz and Caleb very differently
>from the first two and the results are so amazingly different.  In fact,
>having Liz and Caleb later, helped us to mellow out with the first two a
>great deal.   I suppose I'm safe in assuming, however, that you're
>probably not interested in trying our suggested remedy?  (GRIN!)
>Kathy
>
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