Parents' attitude to one another is a guiding factor and is of fundamental importance to a child's upbringing. It astonishes me to see parents smoke and drink in the presence of their children with no regard to the effect it has on them. Anything that threatens the health of a child should be surely avoided. Besides we certainly do not want to give our children the impression that smoking or drinking is a form of relaxation.

Our homes are the best educational institutions that children can ever go to. Most of the impressions they get from their own homes are imprinted permanently in their systems and lasts with them a lifetime. If we look back at our own childhood we will find that it is true. The pattern begins the moment the baby's eyes start to focus on his immediate environments. That is when the parents become role-models for the child's blank mind. The learning process, needless to say, starts early from that stage.

So by the time they are old enough to go to school, that essential pattern of learning has already been set. A teacher can only build on that foundation. It is a psychological cast that has been permanently moulded deep into a child's mind. We parents, frightening as it may sound, provide the raw material or the general make-up of that mould. Expensive schools may well be the answer to a child's bright future, but we must admit, it is a materialistic future that we are talking about. If a child grows up to develop bad relationships with his friends and colleagues, it is not because of his school education but due to his upbringing.

When we say that a certain child has no manners, we readily blame the parents and never the school he studies in. By always blaming other parents for their child's bad behaviour, we unconsciously expose our own failures. Is expensive schooling, a psychological reaction, to try to divert the potential blame for the bad upbringing of our children? Such parents may well later say, ``I don't know what went wrong. I sent him to the best school I could afford.'' It is an age-old virtue that money cannot buy good manners. The kind of person your child grows up to be depends a lot on you.

You have to pay a lot of attention to him/her when he/she is growing up. These days a lot of outside factors can influence your child to go the wrong way. But if the atmosphere at home is healthy and you are able to guide your children well, there is little possibility that they will go wrong. Teach them well.

Best of luck parents.