Hope it was you who introduced the idea of putting kids down NOT me! Do you ever read your posts?
Sorry Floo, but I've just reread not only my relevant posts, but also your relevant posts. You introduced it in post #284. In none of my preceding posts on the topic at hand had I even made a passing reference to putting children down. What I said was (and I paraphrase) that, as parents, one of our roles is to guide our child(ren) to make realistic life-choices. For instance, both our daughters had a hankering after becoming vets during the time we lived out in Nepal. For the one, this
could have been possible, just. She would have had to have worked extremely hard on her Maths, something she is fairly weak in, and her Chemistry - something she quite willingly acknowledged she struggled with. We were happy to run with the idea, but when her GCSE results came out it was clear that she was never going to make the required 3 A Grades in the Sciences at A-levels, so both the Careers Officer at school and her mother and I suggested that she looked in a different direction. To be honest (one of her favourite phrases!!), she is far more cut out to be a creative person - and earlier this year she established her own card-making business. It is still in its developmental stage, but seems to be beginning to catch on in the local area. At no point did my wife or I, or her Careers Office at school, 'put her down': rather we dealt with the reality of what she is better at in the long term.
The other was absolutely brilliant at Drama and languages. She eventually got a 2:1 degree in Drama at Hull University and had hoped to train as a special needs teacher. In her first 2 teaching practices she was on A's; unfortunately, the headteacher of her final practice school took against here - she is somewhat unconventional when it comes to her dress sense and, combined with the fact that she arrived every morning on a bicycle, the head simply refused to allow her through the doors before she was a third of the way through that practice. Unfortunately, because of the special needs nature of the school, she couldn't redo the practice in or near Hull. She has since retrained as a foot health practitioner, and is slowly taking on more and more of the work of my wife's chiropody business.
