What to Write to Your Children While You're Still Healthy

Most parents intend to tell their children the important things. They mean to say what they want them to know about life, what they hope for them, what they're most proud of, what they wish someone had told them. And then the ordinary days accumulate and the conversations don't quite happen, and some of what needed to be said never gets said at all. Writing it down — while you're healthy, while there's no urgency, while it's something you're choosing rather than something you're scrambling to do — is one of the more meaningful things a parent can do.

Write to who they are now and who they're becoming

A letter to your child doesn't have to be a deathbed document. It can be a letter to the person they are right now, from the parent who loves them right now, about the specific things you see in them and want them to know you see. "I watch you move through the world with so much kindness toward people who can do nothing for you, and I want you to know I notice that and I think it's one of the best things about you." That's a letter that can be read and carried while you're both still alive, and that they'll keep for the rest of theirs.

Say the things you think they already know

Parents often skip over the most fundamental things because they assume their children know. Don't. "I love you without condition or ceiling" is worth writing down because some things are too important to only ever be implied. The love that lives in ordinary daily life needs also to live somewhere they can return to, especially in the moments when it might be hardest to feel.

Say what you want for them. Not the achievement version — not "I hope you succeed" — but the human version. "I want you to know peace. I want you to find work that doesn't cost you your self-respect. I want you to love people well and be loved that way back. I want you to like who you are." Those wishes, written down, become something they can carry.

Tell them what they've given you

Children sometimes don't know what they mean to their parents. They know they're loved, but they don't always know the specific ways in which having them in the world changed it. "Before you were born, I was a more impatient person. You taught me to slow down in ways I didn't know I needed." That kind of honesty about what they gave you, rather than just what you gave them, is something they'll read differently than anything else in the letter.

Write it now. Not because anything is wrong, but because things are right — because you're here and they're here and there's time to say the things that shouldn't wait for a harder moment to finally be said.