> John wrote- > >Now Jeroen, I will explain to my children that I should not begrudge > >another person their right to seek employment, nor the right of the > >taxpayers to seek the most value for their money. > Jeroen wrote- > And you really believe they will understand? > > (snip jdg love life and kids) Your oldest kid will > be nine or ten years old when you quit your job. If you get your wife > pregnant every time at the first possible moment after one of your children > is born, the youngest one will be six years old. Do you really believe that > children in that age group (6-10) can grasp economic theory? Maybe if they > are real geniuses, but otherwise they will miss most (if not all) of it. Well, I think we were 12, 10, 5, and 3. The younger two didn't even know what was going on when dad lost his job. We got real life lessons on economy, direct financial impact on the family (in concept, not the bill paying spread sheet), how life isn't alway fair (who would want to pay a 40-45 year old when they could get a cheaper 22-30 year old), and that there are parts of life (and families) that mean more than money. It sucked when dad lost his job, standing in the "milk line" at lunch, and at first learning that Christmas would be "lean". It was one of the best set of life lessons- that dad still believed we could be "anything we wanted", Christmas didn't (and still doesn't) have anything to do with money, and the rotten parts of life pass with time, etc >From my perspective, kids see more than we know and we can never know exactly what each child takes from the experience Dee
