My son is only 13, but I have helped raise a few nieces and nephews who are know in their 20's and 30's. While my wife and I aren't loaded, we are doing well enough where our kid doesn't want for much. That being said, we intentionally try to put him in positions where he has to think on his own and build independence.

I came up struggling in my early years, living in Gary, Indiana, but spent my teen years in a more middle class setting, after my folks moved to Decatur, GA. My wife was born in Detroit and also moved to Atlanta as a teen, so we share the perspective of having lived both hood and suburban.

We've made him ride the bus, when we could easily take him to school. We have him do volunteer work, and we've involved him in different activities to get him out of the house, around various types of people, and into the world. I make it a point to send him into stores on his own to make purchases (I hang back and observe).

I have a friend who has a son the same age as mine. He's always shocked when I tell him, my son is doing some chore unsupervised, or that I dropped him off at the movies, and I'll pick him up later. I'll never openly question someone else's parenting, but I can;t help but feel like he and his wife are hamstringing their kid. They tried to put him o the bus to school, but he said he didn't like it so they drive him. WTF? No one like the bus.

It's important to my wife and I that he learns independence and problem solving. my wife works with kids, and she's constantly complaining about how entitled the current generation is. We don;t subscribe to the notion that since we struggled, he doesn't have to. It's more like, we struggled and that's what has given us character, so he has to struggle some, in order to build his character.

It's changed me in that I now have a greater appreciation for how I came up. When you're a kid you never think about how the struggles you go through pay off in the end. But now, seeing it through, my kid it's soooo obvious.