Personally I have been very lucky, my father built architectural models, my mother ran a small (artisan) shirts/nightgowns factory, both my father's workshop an

Personally I have been very lucky, my father built architectural models, my mother ran a small (artisan) shirts/nightgowns factory, both my father's workshop and my mother's small factory were situated less than 1 km from home. As a kid, in the afternoon, after school and homework, I would go to either and learn something and try and help (doing something easy that I could do). As an example at my mother's there were some kind of dressing gowns that used buttons covered with the same fabric that were to be assembled with a small press. (think today of allowing a 10 year old kid to operate a small manual press) or at my father's there was sometimes the need to make trees (in scale) with some wire, glue and cotton or to sand down a piece of plyboard before painting it. I learned that work was something needed and that if you love your work (as my parents did) it is rarely heavy or tiring, that if there is a deadline, it must be met, that you need to talk to both customers and suppliers, that there are rules and bureaucarcy and you have to deal with them. I can see the difference in mentality against that of some of my cousins whose parents had (possibly "better") office jobs, their parents basically left in the morning and were not seen again till almost dinner time. They had no idea what their parents did, which kind of problems they had to deal with every day, they knew vaguely that they worked in a bank or in an office, that was all.