On Raising a Super-Active Child

Two years ago my kindergarten-aged son sat on the floor and made a great announcement:

"Dad, I'm going to jump my skateboard down the front stairs!"

This was big. This was major. This was even bigger than the time he told me last year that he was , "just going to cut my own hair, okay?", as he stood there, brandishing the school scissors that have the plastic edge-guards, ready to take action. In that second, I released every bodily fluid you could think of, and then some.

Granted the the boy has a great sense of balance, the stairs were just three steps and the welcome mat, and he was wearing a condom. Okay, I'm kidding about that last part. He had one in his pocket. Or I might have had it in my pocket at the time (and not a little over eight years ago, which would have kept me from this current, hyperventilating, wet-in-the-armpit situation), I'm no longer clear on that detail, I was just so startled by what he said. Times like these, you secretly insist skateboards should be equipped with seatbelts. And securely locked in a cabinet.

I have no doubt that my son can make that jump. I just don't think that I'd survive watching it.

Rewind this to nearly three decades ago, to another time, and another pair of scissors. I am in my parents' living room, one arm stretched out to the side, and my back is arched because I am poised to take in a mouthful of a pair of Mom's tailoring scissors, sword-swallower style! I am nearly injured, not because of my poor technical alignment-- not exactly. I am jolted by a scream from my (now understandably) terrified mother. The scissors were quickly taken away, and my uvula saved from a sudden, snippy death. Mom ended my carnival-sideshow aspirations from that moment on. Who knows where I would be today, had she not "saved" me?

I think boys are more likely to take these bizarre physical risks that bear no sanity to sensible grownups (by which I mean "my Mom"). These challenges apparently make sense to us, the experimenters, the curiosity-driven daredevils that "just want to see what would happen if you threw the cat over the fence by its tail, like the hammer-throw on TV". We are the ones who want to test the limits, see how far humanity can go, and push the envelope. Our mothers tell us to carefully fold that envelope shut, and put it back nicely on the lace-doillied coffee table where we found it, it's fine just where it is, thank-you-very-much-that's-a-good-boy.

It makes more sense to be safer, of course. What would life be like for me today if I had to live out my days as The Boy With No Uvula? Having a uvula is a basic necessity for getting into most medical colleges, as you know ( "Mr. Applicant, could you point to your uvula? No? Why is everybody laughing? Men have a uvula, too, I can show you mine...Oh for Heaven's sake, stop laughing!" ).

We can't afford to raise a generation or two of crazy kids without any sense of discpline or self-preservation. We always strive to protect our precious children, whom had one day taken home from the hospital, very gently and slowly carried to the family car, all the while fearing we'd brush the baby-carrier too harshly against the glass door, and damage the baby somehow ("Oops! There goes his uvula!"). Then years later we find they are actually indestructible, made of an organic sort of cast iron. We know this because boys constantly want to prove it by trying to leap off the dinner table.

So we teach them to be afraid-- but just a little. We need them to be well-behaved enough to get through school by remaining seated for hours and writing in a little notebook. Anyone who acts up by jumping off the jungle gym will get into Big Trouble. If you behave well ( i.e. stay in your seat and keep your head down for twelve years or more) you will be rewarded with a job where you have to sit in a chair and get to make lots of notes. When you need to exercise your inner daredevil, you pay money to use an indoor rock-climbing gym. The owner will make the large fortune that everybody's supposed to earn at those desk-jobs school prepared you for.

Someone once said it is not the number of years in your life, but the number of life in your years. Looking back at how much studying indoors I actually did, I realize that living in perfect safety is not at all perfect. We need people who are not just well-behaved, but also have the need to demonstrate unconventional thinking, take some risks, and share the results. We cannot shelter our children forever, even if we tried. I also learned it is impossible to design a skateboard that deploys dual airbags.

Nowadays if he has a good (i.e., well-behaved) week at school, my son dons his helmet and elbow pads and we go every Saturday to the local skate park. He zooms around and through the cement obstacles for two hours, doing ollies, 180's, manuals, switches and hippie jumps. And sometimes, I actually look.