Kids from well off families beats my lot hands down.

alyth

Prudent wrote: »

I think you may be doing your children more favours than you realise. I grew up in a rural Aberdeenshire village, with just the limited opportunties you describe. I was though lucky enough to have ponies as we had land.

As an adult I notice I am much more content with small pleasures than a lot of my friends. My lifestyle is very inexpensive because I enjoy things like country walks, baking, having coffee with friends, gardening. As I am a real home bird one of my favourite hobbies is online comping and its even lucrative. Friends that have grown up with lots of trips to the cinema/theatre and sports/music/dance clubs etc seem to have higher outgoings and feel more miserable when they need to cut back.

I have bought my daughter up in an area that is much more urban (although not a city). I have given her over the years all the opportunities that rural children loose out on. Mostly she dropped them, eventually just sticking with music. Despite the usual brownies/swimming/ dance etc she generally doesn't like group activities.

One thing that has given my dd confidence is going away to Teenranch which is an outdoor centre in Tayside based around horse riding (though they do lots of activities). She now does some voluntary work there. This was great because the costs were very affordable.

I've been reading this thread with interest - I don't have children but I grew up in a very rural area, similar to where you are now, and I live in a part of Perthshire that's again similar to where you are. I'm quoting Prudent's post because I agree so much with what she's said. I'm also a homebird, and whilst I don't have kids, I think that if you had kids and lived where I do it would be difficult to find things for them to do. However, surely you don't want your kids to grow up thinking that they have to always be doing things? I live along a farm track and there are 3 kids that live at the end of the track, and they're out playing on the haybales (probably not allowed!), running about the fields, playing with their dogs, and generally not being exposed to the commercial world that we adults live in! Granted they're probably only early teens, but from what I see of them they are care-free, love just mucking around and don't spend all their times stuck indoors playing computer games!

And I also second Prudent's comment about Teenranch - I thought it was a Christian centre but please correct me if I am wrong, but a girl I worked with used to do voluntary work there, and she loved it, and I believe you can go there for a week's holiday. Otherwise, there are so many places in Scotland similar to the PGL-type holiday but so much cheaper, so maybe consider something like that.

Your kids aren't missing out on anything, I appreciate it's easy for me to say that not having any, you need to know that what you're giving your kids are freedom, the choice that if they want to move somewhere larger and busier then you're doing it the right way round, bringing them up in a rural environment and then giving them the choice to move somewhere else.

ailuro2

It's nice to have your kids home with you for at least some nights every week.they will be grown soon enough.

My DD's classmates seem to be out every night at swimming, dancing, brownies etc, and although we live in a small city that offers a massive range of clubs and classes we limit her to a couple of days a week. Otherwise we would only see her when we were ferrying her to her clubs, and of course it leaves no time for us to do any hobbies we have of our own. She now does gymnastics once a week and martial arts twice a week (one class is with me, a mixed adult and child class at the weekend) and she also used to have swimming until the class times got too late for her bedtime. She does piano at school too. Kids need time to practice their hobbies too, no point going into them half heartedly, is there?:D

aliasojo

Lunar_Eclipse wrote: »

Ouch! I'd find it heartbreaking if my children ever felt the same.

Aliasojo, it's never too late for new paths.

Both my parents are dead...I would never have written this if I thought my Mum would ever have seen it. She was a good woman and I would not have wanted to hurt her in any way.

She was happy with her (Church) circle and what she knew and did were usually just variations on the same, with the same type of people as her. We did have a 'family' life that people are talking about, she was a SAHM and did things with me but I was never confident outwith this circle of same old, same old. I was fine with other little girls in their Sunday best or Brownie uniform or those that stayed beside me.....but encountering anything different or challenging and I crumbled. I never even went on any of the school trips because I was so scared and so unused to doing anything that stretched me. I never got the encouragement or the opportunities to deal with those feelings, push past them and feel the sense of achievement that ensues. So I got stuck on the 'scared' bit.

It was having my kids who changed me. I HAD to be strong and confident for my eldest as he was born with disibilities and in order to get the best for him, I had to find my voice. I often wonder if that's why I got him iyswim.

I'm middle aged now though, at home every day through necessity, hardly an opportunity to change my path now.

Although as I'm sure some of you can attest to....I still have my voice. :rotfl:

Can I just come back to something though....there have been a few posts about the frequency of doing things and about how kids should have time to just do nothing. Just because I want my daughter to have new experiences doesn't mean I want her to be continually active and always be doing something. I'm looking to enrich her not to exhaust her.

Lunar_Eclipse

aliasojo wrote: »

I never got the encouragement or the opportunities to deal with those feelings, push past them and feel the sense of achievement that ensues.

I often wonder if that's why I got him iyswim.

I firmly believe that life teaches you the lessons that you need to learn, so your last point is most interesting.:)

The other thing to bear in mind though is that you feel a wider variety of experiences would have helped you develop as a person. Which doesn't mean it would do the same for your children. Hindsight will probably tell them it was something else they needed.

I know we never like to admit that we would have preferred/needed a few changes to the parenting we received as children, with the benefit of hindsight now we are adults. But that could have helped you enormously. I feel that I was never taught how to deal with my emotions. So I can't have an argument or discuss something I feel really passionately about without crying. Which annoys me immensely. Yet I never remember my parents saying words to the effect of 'it's all right, take a deep breath, calm down and speak calmly when you're ready'. (?)

My 8 year old daughter is naturally very hesistant and nervous about new activities and being out of her comfort zone. How you described yourself above is how I see her sometimes. She went to the toilet four times before her swimming lesson last night. But unlike my own experience of parenting when I was a child, we discuss things. I talk to her about how natural her feelings are and how she feels when she 'achieves' things - like getting through her swimming lesson! Same with abseiling which she did for the first time last week. She is a natural worrier (thankfully not academically, so school tests are fine) but if I can get her to try something new (gentle encouragement, watching first etc) then she realises she can do it and how silly she felt beforehand. And of course how much she enjoys them. Youngest is a 'go for it' girl naturally, so probably doesn't benefit as much from doing new things, looking at it from your hindsight perspective iyswim.

School trips don't really appear as voluntary as they once were IMO. So my 8 year old has her first two night residential school trip this year (Y4). Typically it is only the odd child with some kind of formalised learning/social difficulty that would opt out from a year group of 136.