Laura has great ideas about how to socialize children and set a positive foundation by activities such as going to museums. She fails to contemplate the differences between trying to set such a foundation between the hours of 9AM and 9PM vs trying to set that foundation between the hours of 5PM and 9PM while also trying to overcome the setbacks of the kids living without supervision and basic nutrition and order been the hours of 9AM and 5PM.
Obviously I could have done better in some ways than I did while trying to hold the house together as a single parent for years. Listening to her more would have brought some positive differences, but none of that would have changed the risk forces I was facing that she didn’t have to. I had twice as many kids and ⅓ as much time with them plus they had his upon hours each day where they had no adult supervision. So instead of working with them to build good habits and relationships for 84 hours each week I had 44 hours each week to work with and 5 days a week I got to start working with them after they had been starved of structure and adult oversight (and sometimes any real food) for 8 hours already that day so they were set up to be not receptive to any intervention plus I was forced to focus on foundational things like putting the first actual meal of the day on the table before they went to bed rather than the higher activities such as playing at the park.
Admittedly it wasn’t always that bleak – such as when we had nannies to watch them – but by the time we even had that help they had years of bad habits built up to impede their progress. We were working with less than full resources and starting from less than zero. How can anyone look at the facts and believe that anyone would have a reasonable chance to build even a semi-functional home environment out of that?
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