good traits and kindness, then most will follow suit. It is like that everywhere. It's SO important to have high quality role models. It also helps when they began as friends.

With crappy friends who have crappy parents as peers, even kids with promise wind up in bad situations.

An example from my real life.

When my husband, kids, and I lived in inner city in MA for 14 years, my exceptionally smart and ambitious children hid their grades from their peers who all ridiculed smart kids and pounded on them as nerds. It was "cool" to screw off in school and to defy all reasonable expectations. Teen pregnancies and drug use was cool.

Other parents used to ask me my "secret" in having children who were respectful and helpful around the house, even other people's houses. I was perplexed until my Jaimelynn told me that she took a lot of grief from her friends at sleepovers when she jumped up to help the Mom with getting groceries inside, preparing dinner, cleaning table after, and helping with dishes. She told me that her friends asked her "what the hell are you doing?" and ostracized her after the mother praised her and told her own daughter that she could take a lesson from J. It was easy, tell them what was expected behavior from early on and follow through so it's "normal".

By the middle of her 7th grade year, when 9 of her classmates were pregnant and more than a few had been arrested for various crimes, and Kristin's 5th grade class had 2 pregnant girls, we decided that we HAD to move out of the city to find a better environment for them so they didn't ultimately cave in to peer pressure and screw up their lives.

When we moved in when J was an infant, our neighborhood was pretty safe and family oriented. Everything was well kept and pretty quiet. We bought the only single family house in the neighborhood that was next door to a funeral home (the original owners owned the funeral home and built a single family because they didn't need the extra income of renting out) and on the other side a nice triple decker with French families who'd been there for decades. We had a fenced in backyard that was plenty big enough for our kids and two great parks nearby. Lots of kids lived close to us to.The schools were very good and we figured we were going to be happy there.

Within about 5 years, everything changed. Gangs started moving in as the elderly French couples died off. As the gangs took over entire triple deckers, the nice families moved out, leaving more and more room for the kind of folks who were cool with drugs and crime. In no time, the 4 to five blocks that made up our neighborhood had sorted into 4 different gang territories. We desperately wanted to get out, but inflated housing prices when we'd bought ours suddenly dropped and left us under water with the mortgage. We were stuck!

Soon enough, there were frequent drug raids and a couple of murders on our street, plus violent rapes and constant robberies galore. We couldn't leave anything unattended outside to run into the house to bring stuff in, including bringing in groceries and shopping without it being stolen before we could rush back outside to fetch it. We had installed fire and intrusion alarms a few years after we'd bought the house along with getting a 120 lb German Shepherd trained guard dog that protected our kids when outside in our backyard and our house all night. It was a nightmare there!

Then, outrageous good fortune rained down on us (I've mentioned what happened before but I don't wanna repeat it given the unknown eyeballs hanging around nowadays).

So we researched places to move to now that we'd paid off our house and could afford to build or buy anywhere we liked. I found a regional school system in NH that was considered #1 in the state. So we began looking for something there.

We had looked at several already built homes, but none fit what we actually wanted so we switched to land instead. Properties and land were sold so fast that it was incredibly disheartening trying to find something decent. Most available had extensive sections of ledge close to the surface that would require several series of blasting to break it up deep enough for a foundation. The house plans we'd bought from a NY architect had an enormous foundation that was simply impossible to consider with the degree of ledge in every piece of land not already bought.

Then came across a great piece of land, 18 acres, partially wooded with open fields previously being rented as farmland and bordered by two massive brooks that converged on two corners. The street had ample space between houses, most of which had large plots of land or were ranches or farms so lots of privacy after living in such tight quarters in the city. Minimal ledge but also significant wetland. It had been on the market for 3 months so we expected huge problems with it.

However, when we got there, we discovered WHY no one had bought it yet. The closest neighbor was a total jerk and rushed over to tell us all kinds of problems with the property. Excessive water because of underground springs and flooding in the lower fields, plus hunters all over it firing guns. That had scared off lots of people but not us. My husband was an independent owner operator of excavation equipment and knew exactly how to direct the water to where it would become a plus rather than a negative. Plus, he's sort of a "gun nut" owning lots of firearms and competing nationally with them.

So we put in an offer, 10k less than the asking price and it was accepted immediately. Turns out, the neighbor was the owner's ex-SiL and HE wanted the land for a song so he scared off everyone who looked at it. Boy was he ANGRY when we bought it. He tried every dirty trick to get us to leave it, including threatening our children with being run over by him if the walked on the road and by shooting into his backstop every time they were out in the fields near his place. Theyd grown up around guns so it didnt work.

Anyway, to make this endless story FINALLY get to the point, the school system highly rewarded academic excellence and the kids in it valued good grades and looked down on screw ups like the kids in their former schools.

With such a wonderful academic environment, they blossomed and one graduated 1st and the other 2nd in their high-school class. Both received partial scholarships from excellent universities and were accepted immediately into the honors programs where they each graduated with Presidential Honors & summa cum laude, also in the top 3 of their respective university classes. Both earned that with triple under-grad degree programs.They worked their little butts off!

Both went on to graduate school, one in medicine. K is a trauma surgeon now with a BS in Zoology & Biology, and a BA in Latin, and she is a PA-C trauma surgeon at xxxxxxxxxx in xxxxxxx hospital system in Maine. J has a BA in Psychology, BS in Bio-Chemistry, a minor in business law and a masters in OT. She is currently building a pilot program, the first in NH for Mental Health/Occupational Therapy. She is doing excellent with it. In fact, 2 more major hospitals have invited her to create programs for them.

If not for moving to where healthy attitudes prevailed, I shudder to think where they would have ended up. Their former schoolsmates from the city and besties are a colossal mess now.