Hope for Our Children

Helping our children to understand the unjust world around them can be a difficult task. Given the immensity of injustice, learning about the reality of the world might lead our children to anxiety, despair, or callous indifference. In this paper, I employ and develop the concept of hope to show how these harms can be avoided. In particular, I develop three different threats to children that knowledge of injustice might cause, and offer accounts of three kinds of hope that parents can help to foster in order to avoid those harms. These are hope for the world, hope for their children’s own futures, and hope for their children’s own moral characters. I end by considering whether other attitudes such as faith or righteous anger can serve the role that I have assigned to hope, and argue that they cannot.