\u00a0At the age of nineteen, they were married, full time university students \u2013 and parents. Whatever their plans had been until then, they now had responsibilities to take care of.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Fortunately, their parents had taken the time to plant their feet on the ground and aim their eyes toward the sky.\u00a0 It never occurred to them to do anything BUT to figure out how to create the best possible family they could.\u00a0 They were blessed with the examples of hard work, goal setting and \u2018stick-to-it-ive-ness.\u2019\u00a0 It took \u2018early parenthood\u2019 to bring these skills and attitudes into focus.<\/p>\n

\u00a0That\u2019s the point.\u00a0 Everyone starts somewhere.\u00a0 People are born with unlimited amounts of potential, most of which never gets tapped.\u00a0 Early in their lives, something or someone creates a spark.\u00a0 Circumstances \u2013 often unpleasant ones \u2013 help them catch fire, get to work and accomplish the things that matters to them.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Are the tough times in your life fanning a spark that will grow into a flame?<\/p>\n

$\"\"$ <\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Some days my gratitude list includes that fact that my parents were busy and overwhelmed learning how to take care of me \u2013 otherwise, they might have had time to find out that teen parents are destined to poverty and failure!\u00a0 Fortunately they didn\u2019t know that. \u00a0At the age of nineteen, they were married, full time university students \u2013 and parents. Whatever their plans had been until then, they now had responsibilities to take care of. \u00a0Fortunately, their parents had taken the time to plant their feet on the ground and aim their eyes toward the sky.\u00a0 It never occurred to them to do anything BUT to figure out how to create the best possible family they could.\u00a0 They were blessed with the examples of hard work, goal setting and \u2018stick-to-it-ive-ness.\u2019\u00a0 It took \u2018early parenthood\u2019 to bring these skills and attitudes into focus. \u00a0That\u2019s the point.\u00a0 Everyone starts somewhere.\u00a0 People are born with unlimited amounts of potential, most of which never gets tapped.\u00a0 Early in their lives, something or someone creates a spark.\u00a0 Circumstances \u2013 often unpleasant ones \u2013 help them catch fire, get to work and accomplish the things that matters to them. \u00a0Are the tough times in your life fanning a spark that will grow into a flame?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":14263,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[14,5],"tags":[377,412,453,540,554],"post_folder":[],"class_list":["post-107","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-four-foundations","category-parenting","tag-parenting","tag-potential","tag-role-model","tag-teen-parents","tag-tough-times"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=107"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/14263"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=107"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=107"},{"taxonomy":"post_folder","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.andreapatten.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/post_folder?post=107"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}