Adults who act anything but grown up--
That has been the greatest challenge for me as a parent:
How do you present positive role models for children, when there are so few grown ups whose behavior I'd want them to model?
There's plenty of adults I don't want them to emulate and there's never a shortage of those. It's a fact: grown ups do dumb things: start fights, go to jail, drink and drive...the list goes on...
If I do know of someone who is a hard-worker, has good manners, and has enough street smarts to survive--- that's a good role model.
Growing up, i didn't get a chance to idealize adulthood: Unfortunately there were a couple of men in our extended family who were drunks and deadbeats. That made me realize at a very young age, there are very few "gentlemen" left in the world.
Adults whose almost every other word is a profanity--that gets old and annoying really fast.