My cousin just sent me this article, and it was so beautiful I had to share it here. Emily Rapp writes about her relationship with her terminally ill son. She asks and answers the question “When your child doesn’t have a future, how do you parent?”
OK, I don’t want to be totally morbid, but the article reminded me of unschooling. And I realize that I shouldn’t even be writing about this, because it’s way too easy to be like, “Oh, so, unschooling is like parenting a kid who’s going to die? Because you don’t care about your kid’s future at all?”
No. Not like that. But I thought of those kids in the Race To Nowhere documentary, who were saying stuff like, “I know I’m supposed to be good at all of this, but I don’t know why…I know I have to get into a good college and then get a good job. But I don’t think it really matters if I’m happy.”
Parents are always saying, “The only thing I want is for my child to be happy.” And that might be true. I don’t know– I’m not a parent. I’ll probably look back at this when I’m a parent and think, “You did not know anything about anything.” But it seems to me that even if parents only want their kids to be happy, they are often talking about future happiness. As in, their kid will be happy because of all of the hard work that led . . . → Read More: people are confused about happiness