Shay wrote:
> Jim Charter wrote:
> 
>  > My brother is as fine a goal-oriented, self-made-successful,
>  > athletic, health-conscious, generous, avucular example as ever a
>  > niece and nephew could want...  and he scares the living crap out
>  > of my kids.
> 
> They don't have to like him or in any way want to be like him, but I 
> think it's important that they see that there are alternatives. I've 
> done myself a lot of harm in life by blindly accepting behaviors for 
> which I was never presented an alternative. I was lucky early-on to 
> stumble into some of these alternatives through witless rebellion. 
> Slowly, I'm figuring out some of the others, but I might have saved 
> myself a lot of grief had I (literally) seen as a kid that I could ABC 
> instead of XYZ.
> 
>  -Shay
Yes I also think that exposure to alternatives, in particular 
alternatives to low achievement, is good.  It is in fact one of the 
greatest comforts to me that my kids have had before them a variety of 
high-achieving, quality people who still keep concerns about status at 
an arms length.  There are a lot of things that a childhood growing up 
in Manhattan lacks, but exposure to high achievers is not one of them.
My daughter has been coached by a gold medalist, and partied at the home 
of Oscar winners; a sizable proportion of my son's HS teachers had 
Ph.D's, but he also works at an after school in our local church which 
has an active AIDS support program, and so on.  My daughter goes to a 
leading HS and her friends are dispersed among another half-dozen of the 
city's top schools.  The networking potential is amazing.

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