why am i not doing what i am not doing???

my thought matrix is more or less well laid out... i have definite and strong opinions on most things... i can clearly say and feel what i like and what i do not like...
for instance, i definitely like comfort, but autobiographically, have had to struggle and earn whatever comfort i have in life... and let me tell you, nothing came easy... i have had to hang out of trains in Mumbai travelling every day to Thane, a clean three hours per day, have had to request seniors to escort me down the lift from my 14th floor office late in the night since i was too scared to take the lift alone, run home from the city to the suburbs to be able to pick my toddler from the creche, lest she feels sleepy before her time...
but the fact that i could do all this and more was because that was a choice i made early on that it is a lot more respectable to earn one's own pie before spending it... the freedom that comes with it, the non-accountablility that one has are all later feels, i think... what precedes is the free will to choose... and for that my parents are responsible... it is they who taught me how to make the correct choice... later to be supplemented by my husband... who did not himself take any short-cuts...
the point of this post is however nothing that i have done... it is what i am not able to do for R, as a mother... i need to be more focused when i lay out choices before her so that in her day and time, she can make the right choices, but somewhere i feel, why allow her to struggle? anyways she has to in later life... let her have things on a platter now... i do not think my parents had that dialogue within themselves... they were decided that we, brother and sister, had to earn (be it better grades while we were students or be it money that we would ultimately inherit) to enjoy... so we were not given any easy way outs... why am i not being able to do that for R? why am i lenient when it comes to giving her a harder alternative?