"She is going to experience terrible circumstances, terrible people, terrible events and have terrible feelings arise. Avoiding discussing what is uncomfortable and scares us, doesn't protect us from it, it makes us even more reactive to it."

My wife has been awfully worried about growing concerns in the school system and the prospect of violence/mass casualty events. Due to the nature of my job, I study the events and prepare for worst case scenarios all of the time. I get anxious in crowds always looking for atypical or "red flag" behavior. I do my best to not take it home. I try to tell her that no matter what we do, we cannot protect our kids from everything. We can only hope to teach them to deal with situations on their own and hopefully make the right choices.

She really wants to do home school. I'm torn about it. I'm less worried about the violence issue, and more worried about the failings of public schooling built to "save" the least able student. (I remember being incredibly bored with redundancy at a certain age and basically checked out mentally.) In any case, I'm also worried that my kid is going to miss out on important social learning from his peers. Everything seems like the most important thing ever at a young age. Those situations stick with you and shape you. The dynamics of generational social contexts is going to be something I won't be able to teach because I'm disconnected from learning in that critical period which is dictated by the current environment.