The Safety Nets We All Need (Content Warning)
“The times are urgent, we must slow down.” – Bayo Akomolafe
⚠️ Content note: This piece includes reflections on death and mortality. Please take care if you’re feeling tender around this topic right now, and engage only as feels supportive to you.
A Morning Conversation About Death
“Mommy, I don’t want you to die. I don’t want to be without you.”
Her lower lip trembles as tears well up. We are supposed to leave for school in five minutes, something an earlier version of me would have found important. I cuddle her close.
My mind starts to spin: Am I dying? Does she know something I don’t? How do I give her reassurance when I can’t promise her certainty?
“I know you feel scared of me dying,” I say, “but I don’t think that’s happening anytime soon. People usually die when they’re older and I do everything I can to take care of my body and mind so I can live to a really old age.” She is quiet, thinking, her brow furrowed.
“But even one day when I do die,” I add, “you already have me with you. When you listen to yourself and follow your own path, I’ll be right there cheering you on.” I put my hand on her chest.
“Mommy, I don’t even know how to drive yet.”
“Oh my love… I think that I’ll probably die when I’m really, really old, and by then you’ll already be driving. But if something happens sooner, you are surrounded by so much love. You would never be left alone. That’s what community is, we fill the gaps for one another.”
I am talking to a four-year-old, yes. But inside this conversation I am trying to pass along the things I would want her to remember if I was no longer actually here: self-care, listening to herself, leaning into community, and most of all, finding ways to settle her nervous system even when there are no clear answers.
“Will you come back after you die?” she asks.
“No one really knows,” I say. “But I believe we come back.”
She pauses, then whispers, “I just want to be a baby. Can I always be your baby?”
“Always, my love. You will forever be my baby.” She crawls into my lap, making herself small, and together we look at pictures from the day she was born until her breathing steadies. A moment of peace, held together against the weight of the unknown. In the distance, I hear the school bell.
Why Am I Telling You This Story?
Some of you may be wondering what relevance this conversation has to the work I do, but the reality is… this conversation with my daughter mirrors some of thee same themes I work around every day with leaders, teams, and communities: how to prioritize care when systems impose other expectations, to hold fear and uncertainty without rushing to fix it, and how to create conditions for safety when clear answers don’t exist.
Our systems (like work and school) often prioritize compliance, urgency, and productivity over presence, belonging, and care. But people don’t leave their fears or grief at the door. They bring their whole selves with them. And when we pretend otherwise, we don’t protect them; we isolate them.
True leadership in urgent times isn’t about bypassing the hard, or offering false certainty. It’s about:
Slowing down enough to notice what matters most.
Naming the hard so no one has to carry it alone.
Designing safety nets of trust, care, and community, so that when fear arises, as it inevitably will, we are not left in isolation, but held in connection.
When Systems Punish Humanity
These thoughts became even clearer to me as I reflected later in the day about my choice to keep my daughter home that morning.
She attends public school, where three late arrivals in a school year can trigger a truancy label, a label that can lead to review boards, fines, and even the loss of social benefits. The intent — to encourage regular attendance, which is tied to both student outcomes and school funding — is understandable. But in practice, the system punishes families who are already under strain. And ultimately, that truancy label carries an increased likelihood of youth incarceration. Add to this that such punishments are applied far more often to children of color than to their white peers, and it becomes clear how a seemingly strategic decision perpetuates systemic harm.
I will name that for me, pausing to hold my child’s fear carried little risk. We live across the street from her school. My child is white. And I would like to believe that the administrators understand enough about the school-to-prison pipeline to approach the truancy label with more discretion. But the system itself is designed for punitive response, which means that more often than not, harm is the outcome. For a family living farther away, juggling multiple jobs, or navigating additional stressors or systemic barriers, that same pause could have much more severe consequences — for their future, and for their emotional wellbeing. Punitive systems don’t just pressure adults; they send a message to children that their needs for care and connection come second to compliance.
What if the real goal of education – and even leadership more broadly – was to model support and connection? What if we designed policies that supported both attendance and humanity? What if the very structures meant to hold us were safety nets, not traps?
A Question for Us All
Take a moment today to look at your particular context: where are people being punished for being human?
What might it look like to shift your system – whether at work, in school, or in your community – so that it holds us through the unknown with care, instead of isolating us with fear?
Remember, if it’s hard to come up with an answer to the second question, that’s normal. It goes against so much of how we’ve been socialized — to glorify compliance, productivity, and control over care, curiosity, and connection. But what if we thought about it differently? What if we reimagined success not as doing more, but as creating systems that allow us to be more fully human?