Day 28 of Blogvember. A full list of prompts for the month is available.

I hope my children have a good future. Challenges confront them large and small.

Some of my immediate hopes include:

  • they don’t fall in with the wrong crowd.
  • they develop deep friendships - the type where you can trust the other with your deepest secrets and fears.
  • they don’t fall down a drug vortex.
  • they find fun in their childhood.
  • they muddle through their difficult teen years.

Any prior generation to mine could probably stop there. Yet now I feel like our kids are faced with an existential crisis, the likes of which we have never battled before. I fear that the world they grow up in will be damaged and impacted by anthropogenic global warming, that will bring down all sorts of issues. In this sense, I hope:

  • their generation can actually recognise and respond to this ‘wicked problem’, as economist Ross Garnaut described climate change.
  • they don’t experience a dramatically less hospitable world in which to live.
  • they don’t experience wars and upheaval resulting from large-scale migration from inhospitable locations and a fight for diminishing resources.
  • they can still eat fish caught from the sea, hoping that they haven’t been fished to extinction.

It’s a worrying world. Some of my hopes for my children I can influence through effective parenting. Others are completely outside of my direct control. All I have is hope.