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Chapter 4 51 There is no guarantee that parents will succeed in raising a human being that will flourish. Firstly because parents cannot control all the things that can happen to their child, but also because child-rearing itself (the things that parents do) is ‘a leap of faith’. Child-rearing is inherently ‘risky’, because children are free to not do what their parents have intended by raising them. In other words, apart from a general influence of luck on what life might bring – whether it will be a flourishing one or not – we discuss here a particular form of risk, namely that when parents raise a child, there is no guarantee of knowing whether their parenting will succeed. This paper thus concentrates on the inherent risk of child-rearing and parenthood as one specific way in which parents’ striving for a flourishing life for their children is uncertain. We will start with some remarks on parenthood, child-rearing and the parent-child relationship to give our argument context. Then, we will elaborate on how we can understand this inherent risk of parenthood as taking an ‘existential risk’ ( Wagnis ) by using the work of Otto Friedrich Bollnow. 2 We will argue that Bollnow’s description of education as a Wagnis (i) contributes to the understanding of child-rearing and striving for flourishing as inherently uncertain; (ii) contributes to a clarification of the ways in which the concept of risk is being used in educational theory and policymaking; and (iii) leads us to recognise trust as a key concept in discussing risk-taking and child-rearing. We will argue that it is characteristic for parents to have an ‘ a priori’ trusting belief in their children and that this is good and valuable. 4.2 P ARENTS AND C HILDREN Judith Suissa argues that philosophy of education is in need of ‘a philosophical understanding of the parent-child relationship which will enable us to address broader questions about education’. 3 When parents are discussed in philosophy of education, she says, it is often in a very narrow context, or focused on legalistic aspects of parenthood, such as rights and conflicts. 4 A philosophical understanding of the parent-child relationship should pay more attention to the uniqueness of this relationship. 5 We will make a few remarks on the parent-child relationship in order to provide a rough conceptual framework, which will enable us to address the broad question of parenthood and risk. 2 Bollnow 1959. 3 Suissa 2006, p. 75. 4 Ibid., p. 67. 5 ‘Uniqueness’ in two senses: 1) as a relationship sui generis ; the pedagogical relationship is a unique kind of relationship, see Spiecker 1984; and 2) every particular parent-child relationship is unique, see Ramaekers and Suissa 2012.