Parenting for Profit
Most people measure parenting by what they give. The better measure is what grows back. The return you cannot measure—but will live inside for the rest of your life I am very close to my five grown children. Close in the way that actually matters — not just birthdays and group texts, but in the daily, ordinary ways that tell you something real about the kind of parenting you did. Three of them live on my property. My grandson—twenty-five now and doing just fine—stays in the mother-in-law suite. The others have respectable jobs. Two are self-employed. One manages a store. They are building lives of their own, with their own hands, on their own terms. And still, when something breaks, they come to me. Not because they have to. Because they want to. That tells me everything. This is not a perfect family. But it is a profitable one. Not because I gave them everything — but because I didn't. I taught them to stand on their own feet, just like my father taught me. ...