A Fearless Family understands that the future is unknown, but it does not have to be scary.
Take your average family with your average young kids. The family probably expects their kids to grow up, get a job, have a house, a family of their own, and generally wander about in the world in a similar fashion to the parents. The parents understand that they don’t know what kind of job their child will have, where they will live, if they will get divorced after they get married, if there will be grandkids, whether a serious auto accident will change plans drastically, whether the new tax rates will affect their child’s savings, if the child will progress steadily at their place of employment or get laid off and have to start over in a new job or line of work, and the parents do not know specifially what anything in their child’s life will look like in the future.
And yet, the parents will almost certainly send their kids to school, start a savings account for them, teach them how to talk to people, apply for jobs, hwo to treat their family members and stay in touch, cook, shop, and operate a bank account. The parents set in place all the tools and skills they can muster to put their children in a position to handle whatever comes at them in the future.
Parents universally understand that the future is unknown. And yet, they are seldom scared of it because they are able to equip their children with what they need to handle what comes up.
These same parents are often paralyzed by fear of the unknown, however, when it comes to their special needs children, who may not be able to navigate the world and its unknowns by themselves. For some reason, the unknown becomes scary, often debilitatingly so, when parents think about the future of their special needs child. And so, instead of putting together the tools and skills and supports that their special child will need, they hide their head and throw up excuses for why they can’t get to it right now, all in an effort to flee from what scares them.
A Fearless Family accepts that the future is unknown. They accept that there are tools to prepare their special needs child for the future just as there are tools to prepare their other children. A Fearless Family accepts that while these tools are different, they are just as useful and just as necessary and that they make the future no less unknown, but a whole lot less scary.
And a Fearless Family plunges into the fear so that it can be released.