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Chapter 5 80 combination of high expectations and goal-thinking, because it (a) tells parents what children ‘need’, i.e. how they should develop/be developed, which is susceptible to creating or raising parents’ expectations of a particular kind, and (b) it depicts flourishing as a goal (or isn’t clear about that it can’t be a goal). But this leaves the question how parents should relate to the flourishing life of their children still unanswered. When Emily learned about early intervention programs that could possibly benefit her son, one could say that she ‘got her hopes up’ and that this activated her ‘transforming love’. According to Patrick Shade, an attitude of hope indeed implies an ‘active commitment to the desirability and realisability’ towards the object of hope; in other words, when a parent hopes, she will do what she can to contribute to fulfilling this hope. 56 Or, as Terry Eagleton writes; ‘there is a sense in which hope is performative as well as optative’. 57 Hope is not merely a passive desire, but to have confidence in the form of hope may help to commit to the realisation of one’s hope. How then, is an attitude of hope different from an attitude of expectations? We will answer this question in the following, final, section. 5.2.3 A PARENTAL ATTITUDE OF HOPE WITH REGARD TO THE FUTURE FLOURISHING OF THEIR CHILDREN The parental hope with regard to the flourishing of their children is an example of what Godfrey and Halpin call ‘ultimate hope’. 58 Ultimate hope aims at an ultimate aim, which is difficult to achieve, in the sense that often there are obstacles in the way of its fulfilment. 59 It can be distinguished from ‘common-or-garden hope’, which is not ultimate (e.g. hope it’s going to rain tomorrow), but also from absolute hope, which is un-aimed, and more like a basic faith in the future. The concepts of hoping and expecting certainly bear similarities. As said, they are both attitudes of anticipation towards (the possibility of) realising some future object or event. One difference between hoping and expecting, however, is that when one hopes one desires the object of one’s hopes to be fulfilled, whereas with expectations – at least with descriptive expectations – this is not necessarily the case. A parent might expect that their teenager will get into trouble, but not want this to happen, whereas when a parent says that she hopes that the child gets into trouble, 56 Shade 2001, p. 70. 57 Eagleton 2015, p. 84. 58 Godfrey 1987; Halpin 2003, p. 17. 59 Godfrey 1987, p. 14.