We know of this quiet, invisible script that runs in the back of so many parents’ minds: a set of inherited beliefs about success, safety, and what it means to raise a “good” child.
The same voice subconsciously tells us, “Don’t aim too high. Don’t take up too much space. Don’t get carried away.” It masquerades as practicality, wisdom, and love. These beliefs continue downward in the way we speak to our kids:
“Be careful.”
“Don’t dream too big.”
“Settle down.”
In all fairness, we know it’s not because parents explicitly want to hold their kids back. It’s that we were taught, collectively and through generations of fear, that playing it safe is the way to survive.
And it shows up everywhere, even in the way we think about education.
The idea of stepping outside of traditional schooling—of choosing something like unschooling or self-directed learning—triggers an almost primal discomfort in many parents and families. “What if they fall behind?” “What if they don’t get a proper job?” “What if I ruin their future?”
Most of us were raised with the idea that security is the goal. Our parents and grandparents lived through times of instability, after all: wars, economic crashes, and political unrest. They learned, through experience, that taking risks could mean losing everything. So it follows that we were taught to value safety over possibility.
But without current context, we, in turn, pass down these same restrictions to our children. Not because we don’t want them to be happy, but because somewhere along the way, we started mistaking survival for success.
Beneath these concerns isn’t just fear of failure. It’s the fear of doing something unfamiliar. Because we have been deeply, generationally trained to believe that success is about following a known path. And these fears we see so often in our work with parents are the deep-rooted anxieties shaped by generations of messaging about what success should look like.
It bears repeating: you see it in the quiet panic when a child isn’t reading by the “right” age. You hear it in the awkward family dinners where someone says, “So, when are you putting them back in real school?” You feel it in the pit of your stomach when you imagine explaining your choices to relatives, friends, even strangers. It’s the fear that without visible milestones — grades, certificates, titles — your child will somehow be seen as “less,” and by extension, so will you.
But these concerns, real as they feel, often come from an outdated playbook. One where survival depended on conformity, and success was dictated by how well you followed the rules, instead of how deeply you understood yourself.
Traditional school gives us the illusion of certainty. Good grades ostensibly lead to a good university, which leads to a good job, which leads to a good life. Study hard, score well, collect your certificates, and eventually, you’ll unlock a stable, respectable future. Right?
Except, we all know that’s not really how it works.
People who followed the rules have ended up miserable. They ticked every box and still feel like something is missing. That’s because, deep down, success isn’t about getting the right pieces in place. It’s about knowing how to build something meaningful from the pieces you have.
It’s understanding that real life isn’t a straight line; it’s messy, unpredictable, and full of detours and curveballs that no report card can prepare you for. Industries change. Economies collapse. Jobs that exist today may disappear tomorrow. Meanwhile, the skills that actually help us survive — creativity, problem-solving, resilience, and emotional intelligence — rarely show up on a standardised exam paper.
For us, rethinking education isn’t just about schooling. It’s about rethinking who we allow our children to become that forms the bedrock of whatever curriculum will follow.
If we want them to grow into curious, capable, resilient people, we have to let them experience the world in ways that go beyond textbooks and exams. We have to trust that learning is bigger than classrooms. That success isn’t just about safety; it’s about having the courage to explore, to try, to fail, to adapt. And from this, return stronger, with the resilience and self-belief to weather any obstacle that comes our way. This, however, is work that starts with us.
It starts with recognising our own inherited fears. The ones that make us cling to traditional schooling even when it’s clearly not working for our kids. The ones that make us see alternative education as a risk instead of an opportunity.
Because the truth is, playing it safe isn’t as safe as it seems.
A child who learns how to follow rules but never how to think for themselves isn’t being set up for success. They’re being set up to function and go about the motions, not to thrive. A child who is taught to prioritise stability over curiosity may never learn how to adapt to a world that is constantly changing, or to view it with fear and apprehension. A child who is taught that the only way forward is the way things have always been done may never discover what they’re truly capable of.
This brings us to the hardest lesson of all–and it’s not for the kids. It’s about how, as parents, we need to let go.
If we want to raise children who are free to build meaningful lives, we have to be willing to let them step beyond what we are comfortable with. And that means what we’re comfortable with as a family unit. That means rethinking what success looks like. That means trusting that they don’t need to be micromanaged into compliance to become capable adults. That means accepting that our fear is not their future.
Yes, choosing a different path for your child is scary. Yes, people will judge. Yes, there are unknowns.
But that’s always been true. Every generation faces its own version of uncertainty — the fear just wears different clothes. Once, it was fear of, for example, leaving the family business. Fear of moving to a new city, a new country, a new life. Fear of speaking a new language. The difference now is that we have the chance to recognise that fear for what it is — not a warning to stop, but an invitation to grow.
Stepping into the unknown has always been part of building something better. It’s uncomfortable. It means carrying the weight of choices you can’t perfectly predict the outcome of. But staying inside the lines isn’t a guarantee of safety either; it’s just a guarantee of sameness.
People will have opinions. They always have, and they always will. But their opinions were never meant to be the compass by which you steer your child’s life. If we spent less energy worrying about being understood and more energy staying true to what we know about our children, perhaps we would find a kind of freedom we didn’t realise we were seeking.
When you make a choice rooted in care, intention, and understanding instead of conformity, you give your child something far more valuable than social approval. You’re giving them a foundation that doesn’t crack every time the world changes its mind about what is “acceptable” or “successful.”
So if we really want our kids to succeed, maybe it’s time we stop asking them to settle. We don’t have to live from survival anymore. Survival no longer has to be the ceiling; it’s our floor. We have the chance to build lives and educational paths for our kids, rooted not in fear, but in possibility. To do that, we need to stop confusing safety with living.
We have to dare to trust that curiosity, risk, and even failure aren’t threats, but the building blocks of a life well-lived and well-experienced. We have to dare to believe that we are allowed to want more—not more in the shallow sense of status or validation, but more freedom, more joy, more alignment with who we really are. We have to trust that our children deserve it too. It’s not naive to reach for something better; it’s brave. It’s not selfish to want peace, wonder, and fulfilment for our families; it’s necessary.
When we stop measuring success by how well we fit into an outdated system and start measuring it by how deeply we are living, we open ourselves to receiving good things, not because we chased them down in fear, but because we made space for them in trust.
If we want our children to grow beyond survival, we have to be willing to do it first. We have to be willing to believe that we not only deserve more, but that we can have it. The world belongs to those willing to explore it. Are we going to inspire them in that endeavour?