Ho‘ohana Aloha

I adore stories like this. They help you better understand your gifts as a remarkable human being.

Found via the DailyGood newsletter with this quote:

The young do not know enough to be prudent, and therefore they attempt the impossible - and achieve it, generation after generation.
- Pearl S. Buck -

Almost from the beginning, it was clear that the older of the Wilsons’ two sons would be a difficult child to keep on the ground… “Where does it come from?” Kenneth and his wife, Tiffany, have asked themselves many times. Kenneth is a Coca-Cola bottler, a skier, an ex-football player. Tiffany is a yoga instructor. “Neither of us knows a dang thing about science,” Kenneth says.

But they did know how to be extraordinary parents:

For his fifth birthday, [son Taylor] wanted a crane. But when his parents brought him to a toy store, the boy saw it as an act of provocation. “No,” he yelled, stomping his foot. “I want a real one.” This is about the time any other father might have put his own foot down. But Kenneth called a friend who owns a construction company, and on Taylor’s birthday a six-ton crane pulled up to the party. The kids sat on the operator’s lap and took turns at the controls, guiding the boom as it swung above the rooftops on Northern Hills Drive. To the assembled parents, dressed in hard hats, the Wilsons’ parenting style must have appeared curiously indulgent. In a few years, as Taylor began to get into some supremely dangerous stuff, it would seem perilously laissez-faire. But their approach to child rearing is, in fact, uncommonly intentional. “We want to help our children figure out who they are,” Kenneth says, “and then do everything we can to help them nurture that.”