The parent's trap - by Garrett Bucks - The White Pages — The parent's trap⁠↗

Fifteen years from now sometimes seems like a million years from now but then I remember how quickly the previously fifteen years of life have flashed by and suddenly I’m terrified. It’s an absolutely wild variety of terror, this “oh goodness I only get so much time with these human beings while they’re young and what if I mess it all up” feeling.

I’m not actually scared of the people my children will or won’t be. I’m trying to fill their still-mostly-empty life-suitcases with a half-lifetime of my own accumulated shame, regret and insecurity.

How do you explain the phalanx of progressive parents who betray their purported values when they choose where to send their kids’ to school, without admitting that so many of us need our kids’ academic success as a valedictory token? Why do we ask our kids to pledge allegiance either to a flag or a copy of “A is for Activist” if we’re not hoping, somewhere deep down, to receive some cosmic reassurance that our own loyalty to those totems is, in fact, the One True Faith?