Our greatest gift to our children may be the courage, gratitude, and compassion to choose their own path.

Protecting children from uncertainty may leave them less prepared to navigate the world they'll inherit.

Our children need more than opportunities to succeed. They need the wisdom to decide what's worth pursuing.

Sometimes the greatest act of parental love is knowing when to put down the pencil and let children draw.

It was Sunday, and I had already spent the morning speaking with a refugee family facing an asylum hearing before a newly appointed former ICE attorney. According to what records we could find, the attorney had not granted asylum to anyone before him. The family had limited savings and no safe choice; they had to decide whether to spend what little they had on a lawyer to fight for the life they’d built here, or preserve that money for the possibility of beginning somewhere else. The conversation weighed on me all day, its impossible arithmetic lodged somewhere between my ribs.

A few hours later, I was sitting down for a mother-daughter high tea at the Drake Hotel in Chicago, and the transition felt almost obscene with silver teapots and delicate china, tiered trays crowded with tiny sandwiches and immaculate pastries, chandeliers glowing overhead, and all the lovely excess of a room designed to make abundance feel effortless. After the morning I'd just spent contemplating how much hope a family could afford to gamble, I felt as though I'd wandered through some invisible door and landed at a Capitol feast from The Hunger Games. And then, surrounded by all that affluence, we began talking about what every parent eventually talks about: Our children.

My daughter is 15, a sophomore in an extraordinarily rigorous academic program, and apparently, I'd missed a memo. Everyone was touring colleges. Not seniors or even juniors. Sophomores. One person at the table had toured as a freshman.

There was summer school, too, not because anyone was struggling, but apparently they had another rung to climb. Kids took extra courses over the summer so they could move into more advanced math the following year, which would presumably position them for the next........

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