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Chapter 5 68 5.1 I NTRODUCTION ‘ Perhaps the only happiness we can attain is a hope that it will arrive ’ Terry Eagleton, Hope without optimism 1 In his book Far from the tree , Andrew Solomon tells the stories of children who turned out very different from their parents. 2 There are chapters about deafness, children who became criminals, gay children, and more kinds of apples that fell far from the parental trees. What all these families have in common is that the lives of their children were not what their parents had expected them to be, and Solomon describes with much eye for detail what the parents had expected from their children’s (flourishing) lives, which hopes have flown out the window, what parents expect from themselves as parents, and what others (professionals, peers) tell them they should do, or be like, as parents. The aim of this article is to explore different parental attitudes towards aiming for the flourishing of their children; i.e. the aim that can be described as ‘their children living flourishing lives’. ‘To expect’ and ‘to hope’ are key concepts in this discussion. We will start this article by giving a detailed description of one of the families that were interviewed by Solomon: Emily and Charles Kingsley, whose son with Down’s syndrome was born in 1974 in the United States. The significance of this story lies not so much in the fact that Jason has Down’s Syndrome, but in that it is an illuminating example of what parents’ hopes and expectations can be like. 3 Ruth Cigman argues that recent educational theory on human flourishing is often ‘unpopulated’, meaning that real people are being neglected. 4 By starting with a real life example, as well as by referring to sociological research throughout this article, we hope to exemplify what we intend to discuss. 56 1 Eagleton 2015, p. 45. 2 Solomon 2012. 3 We do not want to imply here that we think that parents of children with disabilities do not face other, and often more difficult challenges with regard to their children than parents of children without such disabilities, because generally speaking they do. The point here is that Jason’s story is not exclusively an example of what it is like to have a child with Down’s Syndrome. 4 Cigman 2018. 5 It must be added that this is a particular ‘lived world’, namely the USA (where Jason was born and the sociological research we use took place), and Western Europe (where the authors live and see a similarity between the American examples and Western-European parenting). 6 See also Margalit 2002 on ‘e.g. philosophy’.