Protection, Part 1

When I was little, about seven years old, my dad bought a similarly little motorbike for me to play on. It was red and noisy and exciting. Truth be told, I was a little scared of it. It felt pretty fast to me, and I wasn’t confident enough to get the most out of it.

We went on a family camp with the cubs one year and took the bike with us. My dad looking after maybe twenty excitable boys and their desire to ride the dinky machine. I went first, and out came the show off in me. I went far beyond the area my dad had marked out for riding, and onto the slicked down grass of the route that cars had taken into the campsite.

My fledgling ego dictated that the throttle remained pinned open, despite the increasingly bumpy terrain and my distinct lack of ability.

Moments later I was bucked from the bike, cartwheeling over the bars and onto the ground in a tangled heap. I had run out of talent in dramatic fashion, and had no chance of holding back the tears. My dad (and the other boys) ran over to me and assessed the damage: a bleeding lip where my tooth had pierced it, and a bruise on my ego, but nothing more. I still have the scar on the outside of my lip. I’m not sure whether my ego recovered.

Like this, only more crashy.

At the time, once the tears stopped, I didn’t think anything more of it. I didn’t ride the bike again for quite a while.

I’m grateful for the masses of fun stuff I used to get to do as a boy. Our back garden was a small, disused quarry which me, my sister and brother treated as our own personal adventure playground. Climbing trees, skidding down muddy slopes, running through the masses of nettles and brambles. Fantastic stuff.

Scary stuff.

When I look at my little two month old son, I can’t imagine ever thinking: “I know, I’ll sit him on top of an engine with two wheels attached and let him loose on a field”. What if he too displays more ambition than ability, but instead of an inadvertent lip piercing ends up with broken bones, knackered nerves, or worse?

I imagine an impromptu mini-motocross event is the sort of thing which cub scout organisers will not allow in these days of risk assessments and liability insurance, and our garden will only take thirty seconds for even the least daring of children to explore.

But I don’t want Cam to grow up cocooned in cotton wool. I don’t want him to fear the unknown and to suddenly realise, later in life, that he’s paralysed by fear when faced with anything more exciting than an Xbox game.

The urge to protect is as strong for me now as it must have been when my dad strapped that helmet onto my head, sat me on the motorbike and watched me disappear in a blue tinted cloud of two stroke fumes.

So how do you, as a parent, balance the risk of pain, injury, even death, against the desire for a well rounded, well adjusted child who has experienced a range of the awesome things that the world has on offer? Preferably without having some kind of nervous breakdown.

What activities do your kids do that make your heart stand still? Are there things you just won’t allow them to do, for their safety and your sanity? Let me know in le box du comment.

Thanks for reading :-)