22.09.2026
Children
You’ve got your daughter’s report card in front of you and it isn’t what you expected. You tell her she’s capable of much more. She doesn’t look up from her phone.
You press. She says maybe she doesn’t care about grades. And you start saying that her future depends on this, and you don’t finish, because she cuts in:
“My future, or yours?”
That’s the end of the conversation, and you both know it.
I educated my children at home for eighteen years, so I know that question well. It was on me the whole time, and it isn’t an unfair one: it’s the only one you really have to answer. When you decide something like that, you have to know at every moment whether you’re doing it for them or for you, because from the inside the two look very alike and from the outside they look nothing alike.
What makes this so hard isn’t the sleepless nights or the money. It’s that you have to love somebody completely while accepting that their road isn’t yours to decide.
The text places it in a way that took a good deal of weight off me:
I am the father of this universe, the mother, the support, and the grandsire. I am the object of knowledge, the purifier and the syllable om.
Bhagavad-gītā 9.17. 1972 edition.
Read that again thinking about your daughter. If it’s true, you aren’t anybody’s father: you’re the one looking after her for a while. Father and mother is a post that’s already filled.
That doesn’t strip you of authority or let you off the work. It takes something else away, which is ownership. She isn’t yours. She never was, not even when she fitted along your arm.
Once that settles in you, your daughter’s question stops being an attack. It becomes information: she’s telling you where you’ve mixed her life up with your own, and at that age they’re specialists at spotting it before you do.
Answer her. But answer yourself first.
Eighteen years at home produced a book, No Homework, No Marks, with the mistakes left in.