When I was a kid, my parents really dropped the ball when it came to preparing me for the big, scary questions in life. Things like, “what’s the most important thing to be doing in life?” - “how do I know who to trust?” - “what do I do if my parents die?” - and so on and so forth. The hard scary sorts of questions nobody likes to think about. Fortunately, occasions of this sort when I really needed answers like that were very few and far between. But it occurred to me after being on my own in the world a while that, had I known even to consider such things, I’d have had a much better set of bearings, going into my adult life.
Now, I’ve had a lot more kids (with one woman, thank God) than my parents ever did. And I know good and well it isn’t wise to deprive them of a childhood by making them bear the direct weight of such crushing considerations. But it’s been a priority to try to find ways to preemptively ping their awareness toward the *answers* to those kinds of things, so they’ll immediately recognize the path through them, should, God forbid, they ever occur.
Because without such awareness, I cannot imagine how they could ever really make any sound and meaningful decisions about the very important things, at all.