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Chapter 5 79 or one’s own parenting skills, high pressure on children, and eventually disappointment on the parents’ side. 51 With regard to the things parents do that – from their perspective – contribute to their children’s flourishing (e.g. sports, piano lessons, enrolment in ‘top’ universities) that can be considered ‘goals’, it is important to emphasise that flourishing should not be seen, in advance, as the sum of these achieved goals in the sense that flourishing is a goal built up out of several other, smaller, goals. As argued above, it can’t be planned in advance which activities, and to which extent, will give the child (the best chances to) a flourishing life. That is, to achieve the goal of studying at Harvard might turn out to contribute to a child’s flourishing life, for various reasons, but it would be a mistake to expect that ‘if my child gets into to Harvard, she will come to lead a flourishing life’. In other words, parents can have an attitude of expectation toward getting into Harvard (though that, in itself, is problematic too if the expectations are too high and held too strongly), but they ought not to expect something (i.e. a flourishing life) of it. In this sense, there is a place for expectations. Not expecting anything of one’s children seems impossible for most parents, and might be equally negative for children, because the child feels unseen or not supported. We can compare this to how May argues that both ‘accepting love’ (accepting the child as she is) and ‘transforming love’ (encouraging the child’s development) are entailed in good parenting. 52 ‘Accepting love, without transforming love, slides into indulgence and finally neglect. Transforming love, without accepting love, badgers and finally rejects’. 53 Therefore, in sum, we argue that parents should have expectations regarding the things that they think contribute to their child’s flourishing, if parents at the same time remain open to the unforeseen. Expecting one’s children to lead a complete flourishing life is, when descriptive, unlikely or, when normative, unreasonable, because in the case of children, the future is too long and too far away to reasonably oversee whether it will probably be a flourishing one or not. An interpretation of flourishing as a goal in combination with such an expectation is very problematic. Judith Suissa and Stefan Ramaekers show that the current ways of speaking and thinking about child-rearing (in Western culture) are dominated by the language(s) of (developmental) psychology and neuroscience. 54 We can see this in the strategy of concerted cultivation, which clearly reflects dominant ideas in developmental psychology, for example about the merits of parental involvement. 55 We suspect that these ‘languages of parenting’ encourage the problematic 51 Something Lareau (2011) observed as well. 52 May 2005, p. 230. 53 Ibid., p. 231. 54 Ramaekers and Suissa 2012. 55 An example of the dominant claims from psychology here is the (classic) work on ‘parenting styles’ (e.g. Baumrind 1971) in which the ‘best’ parenting style is a style of active involvement and responsiveness, with respect to the child’s (developing) autonomy. This parenting style strongly resembles the strategy of concerted cultivation.