The pages of Business in Vancouver are filled with advice from entrepreneurs about how to succeed in business. Much of it suggests that learning to be resourceful, resilient and responsible is key to being successful. How, then, do parents reconcile wanting their children to win in life with absurd child protection that shuts out early lessons in those 3 Rs?
I got thinking about this after reading Stephen Quinn’s recent column in the Globe and Mail about his experiment in shadowing his eight- and 10-year-old boys as they made their own way home to East Vancouver from downtown.
Actually what got my attention was Quinn’s inspiration: New York columnist Lenore Skenazy, known as “The Worst Mom in America” after she gave her nine-year-old boy a subway map, a transit pass and a $20 bill for emergencies and let him find his way home from Bloomingdale’s in Manhattan.
What really got my attention was that she spun that incident into “a blog, a book, a show on TLC and a speaking tour.” I am now making a bid for “The Worst Dad in North America” because I can outdo Skenazy’s reckless disdain for her child’s safety (for those who see it that way.)
I’m old enough to remember when dogs didn’t have outfits and kids walked, rode their bikes or bused to school. I’ve also been to countries where children are trusted with knives, fire, their younger siblings and running the family store when they are eight and 10.
My wife bused three miles home to Lynn Valley from a kindergarten west of Lonsdale when she was four.
As young parents in the 1980s, she and I were not worried when our five-year-old son used to get on the bus outside our home in James Bay in Victoria and ride a circuit around Oak Bay just for fun. He was born with street smarts. By the time he was six and we were living in Vancouver, he had memorized every bus route in Metro Vancouver. He could tell you every bus to take to get from White Rock to the Phibbs Exchange. We would give him money for a day pass, a lunch and $0.25 to call home in an emergency and let him ride the buses all day long on Saturdays. When he was still six, we would drop him off at the downtown Vancouver bus terminal to take the ferry to see his granny in Victoria. He’d ride the ferry, then get the bus to the downtown Victoria depot and transfer on a city bus to Oak Bay. Nothing untoward ever happened.
By Grade 2, he was taking the 25-minute bus trip both ways to elementary school, as did his three siblings.
Once we all headed out on a camping road trip to Spokane. Our two eldest, then 13 and 11, were whining so incessantly that we drove them to the bus depot in Spokane, gave them money for fares and food, wrote them a parental note to get them across the border, and sent them home. They switched buses in Seattle and safely met up with their grandfather in the Vancouver bus depot.
Lenore Skenazy’s claim that the chances of a stranger abducting and murdering your child are less than the child getting hit by lightning has been challenged, but it does provide some perspective.
As it turns out, the worst thing that happened to our children was my daughter getting injured while she was riding home in a taxi that crashed into another taxi.
Children who are driven to school by their parents are 20 times more likely to be injured than if they were on the bus.
Teaching resourcefulness, resilience and responsibility is always a matter of perspective – and doing what you think is best for your kids.
And no, your dog is in absolutely no danger without an outfit.
