Be ready to be judged, yourself. I am and have been ready to be judged for a long time.
Your story is great and congratulations to you and your offspring. Seems you were an active, participating father in the home; old school.
Thank you, I greatly credit my wife and the example she was able to set for them. She joined my consulting firm 15 years ago, both as a product developer in the laboratory we built in our home, and also serving as the Secretary-Treasurer of my firm.
The beauty of working from home, as we both do, is that when the kids came home from middle and high school, we were often both there (when I wasn't travelling on client business). Our strategy as parents was based on the premise that there was far more value to be accorded to the kids to have parents at home, and available when they were in high school as opposed to when they were in diapers.
And that's where donna's point is most applicable, "They accomplished all that under the direct supervision of others. Their values and characteristics are those of their caretakers." We selected their early caretakers, and we were both there for them at the time when it really mattered.
(Btw, if you dislike being judged, why do you so judge others - self righteous, standing in judgement [sic.], without charity...?)
You must have missed it in my last post when I said, "For those on this board who continue to stand in judgment, I invite you to go ahead and do so." Doesn't really sound like someone who doesn't like being judged, does, it? Quite the opposite, actually. I welcome it.
What I learned how to do years ago was to dispatch with the critics and not care what self-righteous, self-styled judges said. More often than not they hadn't accomplished anything particularly meaningful in their own lives, but they derived what little misplaced importance they thought they had from standing in judgment of me and others.
We now have second generation day care-raised adults as parents. It is social experiment producing bitter fruits. God help us.
I believe I have handily put the lie to this incorrect and overly broad assumption. God has both helped us and blessed our family richly in spite of all the detractors who at the time thought they knew so much.
FReegards!
