BELGRADE LAKES, Me. — THIRTY-SEVEN years ago this week my friend Pearce Bunting was at the wheel of my Volkswagen and I was in the passenger seat when he drove the car off a road in suburban Philadelphia. It bounced off a fire hydrant and then plunged into a small ravine. I remember thinking, as we flew through the air, that I was about to find out whether there was life after death. I heard the crash as if from a distant room. Then a vague blue blob spoke. “Are you all right?” it wanted to know, and then said, more reassuringly, “You’re going to be all right.”

It was the first day of my senior year in high school. That compassionate blue blob turned out to be a policeman in uniform, standing over me as I lay on my back in the middle of Darby Road, staring up at a light blue sky. My glasses had been thrown off in the wreck, which is why everything was so blurry.

The officer got me into an ambulance and on to Bryn Mawr Hospital, where emergency-room doctors sewed my left ear back on. The officer also managed to retrieve my school books from the totaled car. And so it was that later that night I was back in my bedroom, reading Thomas Mann’s “Tonio Kröger” in German from a textbook that had my own blood on the cover. It wasn’t the best way to begin my senior year.

My son Sean, along with four million or so other members of the class of 2014, is about to begin his senior year in high school. It’s impossible for me, and all those other parents, not to want to shield our young from the many accidents we know are waiting for them. Shielding, of course, being the problematic verb here, given that we spend the first decade or so of our children’s lives attempting to stand between them and the brutality of the world, and then, slowly, begin to do the opposite, first gently, and later not so gently, shoving them out into the land of competitive sports, college admissions and fire hydrants of all sorts.

When he was a sophomore, my son was accepted to an exchange program with a high school in Cape Town. We congratulated him for his sense of adventure. A couple of months in, he called home, asking if it would be O.K. if he went bungee jumping from one of the highest bridges in the world. We said all right, as we did a few weeks later when he asked permission to go shark-cage diving. A month went by, and he called again. How about sky-diving? Please? We thought it over, consented, and then, the morning of the jump, sat bolt upright in our bed in Maine. Sky-diving? Seriously?

I know that my own father felt that the world I was graduating into then had partially gone mad. Still, neither of my parents made much of an effort to shield me from it. They seemed confident that if they let me explore the world I would eventually sort things out. My father had been dead for 15 years when I finally came out as transgender, but my mother, conservative, religious Republican that she was, rolled with it. “Love will prevail,” she said, and that largely turned out to be true.

I wonder sometimes how they found the courage to stand by and let me make so many mistakes — giving Pearce Bunting the keys to my Volkswagen being far from the last. Still, if we never give our children permission to get things wrong, they’re unlikely to ever learn how to get things right. For parents this means preparing them for a day when they live their lives without us. The world has not yet revealed the unique perils it holds in store for my sons, but I hope that, having been encouraged to take calculated risks, they will have learned to find the courage they need when those perils arise. I hope that in the future, if they ever find themselves in danger, they too will hear a voice speaking to them out of the blue, telling them, “It’s going to be all right.” Which is, of course, just another way of saying, “love will prevail.”