What are some choices you made about how to raise me?

I have a problem with this question, ‘cos I don’t think parents actually get to ‘raise’ chldren. That seems to imply to me that, as a parent, you feel that if you impose discipline or make demands according to your own personal expectations you can be responsible for the people your children will become. It is probably only as you parent over the years that you realize that each of your children is unique and as much as you may desire for them what you feel is right, they are their own people and will follow their own path.

That said, I think every parent has high hopes of what they can provide for a child to make the best of the future for them - and the choices you make in ‘raising’ your children are things that relate to your own moral code. In ‘raising’ you all we hoped to instill a sense of values which matched our own. I think we always wanted you to know that what you might see in other families may be what was right for them but not necessarily what was right or correct or important to our family.

That moralising apart, probably the one choice that we made in ‘raising’ all of you was the choice we made early on to opt for an education in the French Immersion System. The decision was born of our sense that all of you were blessed with enough capacity to cope with a second language and in giving you that opportunity it would provide you with extra stimulation and more challenging language skills. We have never regretted that decision and I think it allowed all of you to get more out of the years that you spent in school than the regular school system would have done.

I think over the years we also encouraged independance - that may have been as much out of necessity because there were four of you!