When I was about 12 years old, I fell asleep at the dinner table and my dear old da’ poured a glass of ice water over my head to encourage me to better efforts. It worked, but maybe not as well for me as for Microsoft’s Bill Gates:
The future software mogul was a headstrong 12-year-old and was having a particularly nasty argument with his mother at the dinner table. Fed up, his father threw a glass of cold water in the boy’s face.
“Thanks for the shower,” the young Mr. Gates snapped.
The incident lives in Gates family lore not just for its drama but also because it was a rare time that Bill Gates Sr., father of his famous namesake, lost his cool. The argument presaged a turning point in the life of a tempestuous boy that would set him on course to become the Bill Gates whom the public knows as co-founder of Microsoft Corp. and the world’s richest man.
A difficult child can do quite well for himself, as it turns out.
Which is useful for all parents to keep in mind.
And he dropped out of Harvard too!
Greetings:
Something else for parents to keep in mind:
I grew up in the Bronx of the last ’50s and ’60s but was fortunate to be in a family that had a summer bungalow about 60 miles north in Putnam County. Thus, I had the benefit of both an urban culture and a country culture.
Spending summers upstate, my friends were country boys, used to going into the woods, camping overnight, and having our days to ourselves with no threat of nearby adult supervision.
Before long, I wanted to acquire the local accoutrements, guns and knives being my highest priorities. My city-girl mother wasn’t having any of it; my father, born in Ireland and a WWII graduate, quickly became my only chance for a successfull acquisition. Initially, I separated him from his “war-knife” and subsequently began working on him for a 22 caliber rifle.
When my mother found out that my father was having me join a gun club in preparation for my new tool, he and my mother had an intensive dinner time discussion about the appropriateness of a relative youngster having his own firearm. My mother insisted that this was no way to raise a child. My father’s conclusionary statement was “I’m not raising a child; I’m raising a man.”