Scott and I met up with my parents in Memphis over Memorial Day weekend. We found a little park for Preston to play on before we went to dinner, so my mom and I sat watching Scott and my dad show Preston how to go down the tube slide. While I watched Preston cross a bouncing bridge and peer down the slide, I asked my mom, "How did you ever let us play on a playground? That side is wide open for kids to get to the monkey bars, and it's a three-foot drop down! And we used to climb along the tops of the bars and jump off!" "There was a lot of gasping and jumping on my part," she said. "But you were always OK."
While it seems impossible now, at some point Preston will be climbing and leaping and swinging from those bars all on his own, like my sister and I and millions of children before us, and he'll get blisters or scrapes or fall and get the breath knocked out of him, like my sister and I and millions of children before us. And he'll be OK — like my sister and I and millions of children before us.
And those aren't even the scariest things he'll do in his lifetime.
Lately, I've been thinking a lot about the balance between protecting my children and teaching them independence. I keep dwelling on a scene from "Full House" (that beacon of parental wisdom) where Uncle Jesse and Aunt Becky are at odds with each other about which parenting technique is better for their twin boys. They flash forward to the future, and one — influenced by Becky — is a whiney, teenage nerd who still needs cornstarch sprinkled in his pants for diaper rash while the other — lead by Jesse — has multiple tattoos and is too wild to control. While I know there's an in between that is better, sometimes I prefer the idea of the teenage nerd with corn starch in his pants. At least I'd know he's not getting into trouble!
All this thinking was spurred on further by
this article I read on Salon.com. The title, "The day I left my son in the car," had me sickeningly panicked from the beginning, afraid something terrible happened to her son. But it didn't. The four-year-old wanted to stay in the car and play a game on the iPad while she made a quick run into the store. It was an overcast, 50 degree day; she cracked the windows and locked the car and was in and out in less than five minutes. But a bystander saw her leave her son and reported her to the police. Now she was faced with a warrant for her arrest and a trial for endangering her son.
The main thought presented was that society has moved into a school of thought where children are completely unsafe when not under constant parental supervision and how that way of thinking is unfounded. How many times as kids were we left in the car and never thought about all of the ills that could befall? How many times were we free to roam the neighborhood or parks on our own? But now that seems completely reckless. The author speaks with a lady who points out that the most dangerous thing she did was not leaving her child in the car but putting him in the car at all — as more children die in wrecks than in parked cars. But we hear the bad, the one in a million stories, and we as parents feel that we must protect our children from everything. We know too much.
Anything could happen is a common refrain voiced by such parents. And I know what they mean. We’ve seen the television movies about abducted children. We’ve heard the heart-rending stories of kids injured in carjackings, or forgotten in sweltering cars. And once you imagine something, imagine what it must have been like for that parent or child who suffered it, it’s not a great leap to imagine it happening to you or your child, and then, if you’re like most parents, you will do anything in your power to prevent it. It’s not a matter of likelihood or statistical significance, but the terrible power of our imagination.
That hit home with me in a powerful way — because I completely get that. Stories about people who fall, break their nose, and the bone shard penetrates their brain race to the forefront of my mind when I see Preston running with reckless abandon. Stories like Natasha Richardson's fall on the ski slopes and undiagnosed concussion that lead to her death echo alongside the thud of Preston's head when he knocks it on the bath tub faucet. Snake bites, West Nile Virus, food-born illness, broken bones, car wrecks, abductions, drowning … I've thought long, hard and fitfully about them all, not to mention all of the school shootings and other general crazies out there. Forget the nerdy, corn starched teen — Preston's going to be a bubble boy at this rate.
My friend Hannah
posted about dropping off her eldest at camp. She mentioned one girl had fallen on day one and broken her leg. "Sooo sad! Poor girl. And poor parents of all children, having to learn to let our kids spread their wings and explore and break bones," she wrote. And there it was: Not only is it important for children to learn independence, but it's important for their parents to learn to accept that independence and allow it to happen. I feel like I could break out into hives when I think about Preston going to school, being around kids I don't know with a teacher I don't know making decisions without my supervision. But I have to trust in the kid I've raised that he won't do anything truly stupid and that, if he does, one part of learning comes from acquiring bruises, broken bones, broken hearts and other uncomfortable consequences. I can impart what wisdom I have, but another big part of children's learning comes from experiences all their own.
It's a difficult thing to learn … that "Let It Go" is more than a catchy, now overplayed song from a Disney movie.
