Wise counsel, but was he fleeing his own problems? Some parents don’t practice what they preach. There’s an amazing number of people who ascribe to the school of ignoring problems in the hopes that they’ll go away. This yields short-term gratification until problems come to full term. Others are blissfully unaware that they even have problems.
My mother went overseas a lot in her later years after her husband’s death, spending as she put it “my children’s inheritance.” There was barely enough left over to cover her years that followed in assisted living and a nursing home thereafter…ah well!
