(Photo: My incredible daughter and I at her high school graduation. This week she graduates with her master’s from the Royal College of Art in London.)
An excerpt from Puddle Jumpers
Every few weeks, a video goes viral. Kids riding the subway alone, or walks to the store solo, or gets dropped off at a park without a parent hovering nearby.
The comments split instantly into a war of opinion.
One side screams that it is neglect.
The other calls it the only way to raise a capable human. Both are certain. Both are loud.
*Beware the temptation of certainty. The majority of the human population once thought the sun rotated around the earth, and you’d risk persecution for saying otherwise.
I want to offer a different lens, one I learned as a parent who’s been in the trenches and raised three kids (with an amazing co-parent) that are now out of the house and happy. There’s also an amazing science experiment to back up my position.
Here goes…
“In the early ‘90s, the University of Arizona created a biosphere project to mimic space colonization on Mars. Scientists lived and studied in a closed environment to learn how to exist on other planets. One of the most shocking discoveries was that the trees in the biosphere grew tall, but after a time, they would just fall over. Scientists found that, in order to build a firm foundation, the trees actually needed the stress from wind, which was absent inside the biosphere. Just as trees need stress to grow strong, so do our children. Remember this the next time you’re afraid to let your kid go on that overnight trip with friends or ride the subway by themselves.”
That is the whole debate, answered by a tree.
The kids in the biosphere of total protection grow tall and look fine right up until the moment they have to hold themselves up. Then they fall over, because nobody ever let the wind build their roots.
I am not telling you to throw your eight-year-old onto the subway tomorrow. Danger is real and your judgment about your specific kid in your specific city matters. There is a difference between protecting a child from genuine danger and protecting them from the ordinary difficulty that actually builds them.
Bullying, predators, real threats: shield them.
A hard walk to school, a solo errand, a trip that stretches them: that is not danger. That is wind.
The mistake the “safetyism” side makes is treating all discomfort as danger. The mistake the loudest free-range voices make is pretending judgment does not matter at all. The truth lives in between. Be the steady base your kid returns to. Then let them face the wind, in doses they can handle, a little more each year.
Because a kid who is never allowed to feel the wind grows up unable to stand in it.
And one day, you will not be there to hold them up.
Puddle Jumpers. On Amazon now.