Hi Mountain Ash,

I agree with you. Of course, I think you knew I would.

My children are 32 and 29. Both chose to go into the newspaper business, which has meant that while they are doing a job they love, there have been many financial challenges as well as challenges within -- and because of -- their chosen workplaces.

These latter challenges are not things I can or should help them with. But hopefully through doing a good job raising them to be able to think independently and successfully deal with smaller challenges on their own, I have given them the tools to successfully handle life's larger challenges by themselves.

For example, I trained them both to be self reliant people who could think on their feet and figure out how to solve their own problems, while at the same time knowing that they have unconditional love and support from their parents, which they can call on as needed.

I truly believe that we hamper our children if we give them everything and don't allow them to learn to handle their own challenges. This keeps them from gaining confidence and becoming fully-functioning adults. (And isn't that what our job really is, as parents? Training our children to be capable of successfully handling what life throws at them?)

Here's an example of how this has worked for me:

Our son is a news photographer, and he spent five years in college, then lived with us for a summer after graduation, while he worked a temp job. As anyone knows who has had a child return home after living on his/her own, there are challenges.

But we were happy to help him and he was only there for 3 months.

Then he left us to head to Chicago for a freelance job, and from there was hired full time by the St. Pete Times. On the way down to Florida to start the new job, he decided to follow a hurricane, and got the major news service he was freelancing for to contract with him to shoot those pictures on behalf of People Magazine.

The hurricane was called Katrina and he headed to New Orleans, where he hooked up with a reporter and drove into the city and started shooting images.

His reporter got frightened and left town with their car, so my son ended up sleeping on the streets alone with his cameras for a night, then the next day found another news team that he hooked up with.

It turned out that the team working for People were challenged because there were no working ATMs so they had no money, their cell phones didn't work and they couldn't upload their images and reports to electronically submit them. In fact, People and the news service didn't hear from them for a day or two...

This situation was resolved when my son managed to find a working pay phone, and he used it to call People and request that they fly a plane with CASH and sat phones to the closest working airport. They did.

Then he called me and asked me to figure out how to get him some major antibiotics, as he had been spending those first days wading in water filled with dead bodies, and who knows what else.

I called a dentist client of mine and explained the situation and he called in a prescription to Walgreens in my son's name. We picked Walgreen's because of their network, which meant that he was able to go retrieve at some Walgreen's in the region, which he was able to find open.

I truly believe that my son could not have handled this situation had I not trained him to be self reliant and figure things out for himself.

By the way, he saved a houseful of nuns while he was in NO, shot some fantastic images one of which made the cover of People, and saw things that made seasoned war reporters cry.

It was truly a life-changing experience for him, but I doubt he would have lived through it if I had coddled him all his life, by giving up my own life so that he could live without learning to deal with life on his own terms.

Yes, I did help: I got him a prescription without his having to find an available doctor and an open clinic. The rest, however, he did on his own. And because he did so well, I see that as validation of my success as a parent.
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