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Captain Fantastic

 Watched Captain Fantastic recently and could not help thinking about parents including myself try so earnestly to do their best by their kids and end up missing the mark wildly. We come into parenting with our own traumas, baggage and ideas about what perfection means. The people we are raising are not attached to any of that. More often than not what we feel the need to over-correct is not an issue for our children. I was very vacation deprived growing up because my father had a job that kept him on the road a lot and when he was home he just wanted to rest and recover. Travel for fun was not a concept that came to him readily. Visiting ailing grandparents was the only travel we did regularly. 

The rest was considered overboard. Based on such experience, I made overzealous efforts to fit travel into J's life once she was old enough to enjoy and be able to recall the trip. It turned out that J had a very full and complete life in school and outside of it. Fitting a vacation in required her to give up something that she was quite passionate about. So I felt I was putting all this effort and it was mostly in vain. She enjoyed the time out but I never experienced the kind of satisfaction I was hoping to get out of it - I gave my child something wonderful that I did not get myself. The whole process was stressful and underwhelming. We traveled until the year she left to college. I hope she recalls those trips later in life with fondness. 

Any overzealous parent is guilty of what Captain Fantastic does in this movie, He well-intentioned and gets many things rights as a parent but some things end up being way off kilter, It's only a matter of degree.

On one hand, Ben has clearly raised his children to be respectful, bright young adults, but he’s also guilty of sheltering them in his own way, withholding how to interact with others when and if they ever decide to leave the bohemian forest life. It’s as if he hasn’t factored actual adulthood into his parenting plan, giving them each names as unique as their respective intellects, with the socially awkward result that they all sound like characters from “The Lord of the Rings”

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