Sidelines or the Back of the Pack?

Over the past thirteen years, I've spend a fair amount of time watching my kids exercise while I am on the sidelines.  I often thought of the fabulous shape I'd be in if I exercised while they were, but sadly, I rarely did.

Given that I am often a spectator, when I get the chance to participate, I do.  While under no circumstances would I join the Boy on the soccer pitch, there are other activities where I don't want to sit and watch the rest of my family have fun.  And yet, my participation is becoming more challenging as everyone gets older.  The kids are becoming more capable and more courageous, and I worry if I am in good enough shape to keep up.  The kids are becoming exponentially more athletic, whereas my improvement curve is fairly flat.  I also worry about injury.

My mom told me once when I was young never to marry a man who likes to watch sports on television.  My dad will occasionally watch a game, but he is not the type to plug into whatever game is on, knowing nothing about squash or caring about Northwest Missouri State's basketball team.  So I took her advice, which seemed wise at the time.  My husband doesn't watch much television at all, which is fine with me.  The downside is that my anti-couch potato husband refuses to sit still.

My adrenaline junkie husband encourages the kids to try new things, mostly because he wants to try them, too.  Last summer, we went to Whistler.  We went zip lining, downhill mountain biking and white water rafting.  (When I suggested canoeing or trail biking, I got raised eyebrows for a reply, suggesting those activities were for wimps.)  I got a little nervous about all of these things, but sucked it up and was a good soldier.  Ironically, the worst part was the Grouse Grind, a hike up a mountain outside of Vancouver, B.C..  I thought it would be fine given it did not require a helmet, a harness, elbow pads, a pre-activity safety lecture, and/or an insurance waiver.  The night before our ill-fated hike, we went to a very nice restaurant.  The waiter was in his mid-thirties and looked relatively fit.  British Columbia is an outdoorsy kind of place, and it seems that many people ski, hike, bike or participate in some other kind of outdoor activity.  This waiter seemed to fit the profile, so I asked him about the Grouse Grind.

"There is no way I would do that again.  I did it once and I almost died."

Great.

So, we did the Grouse Grind the next day because my anti-couch potato, adrenaline junkie husband insisted.  I was feeling a mix of curious and nervous, but figured I would take it slow.  I was mostly worried that my knees would give out midway or I'd have a stroke, and then I'd be stuck.  The Grouse Grind is one-way uphill trip.  The path is narrow and heavily trafficked.  Once you are on, you can't go back down.  Once you make it to the top, you have to take a gondola down.

So we get to the Grouse Grind, and you can see from this picture who is excited to do this and who couldn't care less.

I stopped to take a picture at the beginning of the hike and they were gone.  I didn't see them until about halfway up.  I ran out of water, and I called Jack and asked him to wait for me.

I was left in the dust out of the gate on the Grouse Grind.

"But I don't know where you are.  How can I wait?"  Grrrr.  You aren't suppose to leave your hiking companions.

The next line was even better.  "I had to keep up with the Boy."  Nice.  Even though it was true, it was not cool that he blamed it on the Boy.

"Where is my daughter?" I asked.

"I don't know," he replied.  Strike three.

I will have this conversation forever recorded in my mind and will use it in case I ever need to call a divorce attorney.  "Your husband left you in the dust on the Grouse Grind, lost your daughter and blamed it on your son?  Excellent.  Tell me what you want..."

I was pissed.  I asked him for the car keys and seriously considered leaving him in Canada and driving back to Seattle when I got to the bottom.  But I didn't.  I was just super mad.  For twenty four hours until Jack conceded he was wrong.  Why was I so mad?  This was supposed to be a family vacation, which means it was for everyone in the family, not just the super athletic.  It also became very apparent that I was now the weak link, the slow poke.  Me, the one who created this family, was now forgotten and shuffled to the back of the line.

Eight months later, we were back in Canada, this time skiing at Whistler.  I am a fairly mediocre skier, but I enjoy it and am content skiing blues and greens at a slow pace.  I am not a big fan of skiing too fast or out of control as I don't want to get hurt.  I've see five year olds crash and then bounce up like nothing happened.  I don't think I'll be that lucky.  We have twenty some odd steps to get up to my house from the street.  A broken leg, sprained ankle or twisted knee would mean spending a few weeks at the Silver Cloud Inn down the street while my family did all of their own cooking and laundry for a few weeks.  Plus, I was to ski another day.

That wee tiny green dot on the left side of the slope is Jack.  The kids are already probably already at the bottom waiting for us.

So I have to decide: would I rather be in the game, in the slow zone, and the worst player on team McGuire, or would I rather be on the bench?  While I am skiing the blues and greens, my family will ski the black runs on the same lift.  They will occasionally venture off to steeper runs, while I stay in my comfort zone.  They were off on the Whistler Bowl, some crazy steep run, while I was having a mocha at the lodge.  Which is fine with me.  I know my limitations, but that isn't going to keep me out of the game.

It also helps that Jack is joining me at the back of the pack, left in the dust by the kids when it comes to skiing.  Already, they are both better than us, and there is no way for us to reasonably catch up.  He knows this.  "There will soon come a day when they will have to do the steep stuff by themselves," he said, tired and a little scared after the Whistler Bowl.

I'll welcome him to join me for a mocha.

Me on the Dave Murray downhill run, skiing back to Creekside.  Jack documented me on a black run.  Yes, we both have the same color ski jackets.   For the record, I got mine first.

Do Over! Wishing My Kids had a More Adventurous and Free-Range Childhood

I'd like to start over being a parent.

Yep.

I don't want to start over with midnight feedings and lack of sleep and breastfeeding, or chasing toddlers around all day.  Egads.  I never want to do that again, thanks.  I'd like to start over from when my kids were five, maybe six.

I just read "Hey! Parents, Leave Those Kids Alone" by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic (April 2014).

http://www.theatlantic.com/features/archive/2014/03/hey-parents-leave-those-kids-alone/358631/

She features a playground in Wales called "The Land."  It looks like a junkyard where kids play with fire.  Literally.  Check out the video in the article.  My daughter, the future lawyer, asked, "Is this place insured?"

Back in the 1970s when I was growing up, kids had more freedom to explore and take risks than kids do today.  We didn't have quite as much freedom as the kids in the video, but we had significantly more than my kids.  One parent interviewed for the article estimated that his child was probably unsupervised for maybe 10 minutes in his child's first ten years of life.  My kids are probably more in the two hour range of total time unsupervised before age 10.  And I am not talking about the countless times they were in the backyard and I was in the house cooking dinner, a shout away from helping them in case of disaster.  

How many minutes were you unsupervised before you were ten?  I can't count that high.  It would add up to days or weeks, or maybe even months.  I was dropped off at the community center for dance classes on Saturday morning and given a quarter to call when it was time for my parents to pick me up in the afternoon.  I had three classes over the course of six hours.  When I wasn't in class, I would roam around the community center with the other girls.  My parents gave me $2 in coins and I ate tons of crap out of the vending machine.  My favorite candy bar was the Whatchamacallit.  When I was in second grade, I was riding my bike around the neighborhood.  I saw groups of boys playing unorganized baseball in the school parking lot.  After school, kids would walk around the neighborhood and find someone to play with.  My brother and I roamed the Disney World campus alone when I was in seventh grade and he was in fifth.  We were gone for hours, riding a boat from Fort Wilderness and then catching the monorail at the Contemporary Hotel.  I was a full fledged babysitter when I was 12.  I earned enough money to pay for a field trip to France in middle school.  Twice.  

How is this constant supervision good for kids?  Does it help them develop into strong, independent and resilient adults?  Probably not.  According to the article, Millennials have greater rates of depression, narcissism and a lack of empathy, and more college kids are taking psychiatric medication.  Kids' test scores on the Torrence Tests of Creative Thinking have declined across the past decade.

I need a minute to get over my depression.  I'll be back.

So what do kids need?  According to the article, Ellen Sandseter, an early education professor, says kids "have a sensory need to taste danger and excitement; this doesn't mean that what they do has to actually be dangerous, only that the feel they are taking great risk.  That scares them, but then they overcome the fear." (p. 80, April 2014.)  She says there are six types of risky play.  

1. Exploring Heights.  Let kids climb trees.  Daughter is taking rock climbing classes.
2. Handling Dangerous Tools.  Thank you, UW Summer Day Camp, for teaching the Boy how to use a hot glue gun.  And John taught the Boy to wax the skis today.
3. Being Near Dangerous Elements.  This means large bodies of water, like an ocean, or near fire.
4. Rough-and-Tumble Play.  I totally fail at letting my kids do this.
5. Speed.  Cycling and Skiing at speeds that feel too fast.  This one is done.  Check.
6. Exploring on one's own.  I let the kids walk the dog around the neighborhood.  Once, Daughter wore her slinky Halloween costume down to UW.  I found out where she went when I checked my phone's "Map My Walk" app.  This was before she had her own phone. 

I started thinking about point 3 and fire.  When I was a kid, we used to go camping almost every weekend in the summer.  Every camping trip, we had a fire.  While my parents were setting up the site, my brother and I would look for kindling.  Once everything was set up, my parents got firewood and my mom started the fire.  On a YMCA Indian Princess campout when I was six, I put a hot marshmallow roasting stick near my mouth.  I had a blister on my upper lip for a week.  I still have a tiny scar.

And not all of the efforts to keep kids safe have been horrible.  My husband is a pediatrician who frequently witnesses freakish accidents that can happen to kids, and as a result, he tends to be pretty strict when it comes to safety.  Seat belts and car seats have protected kids much better than when I was kid.   I remember going to the library as a kid.  My mom or some other mom would pack six or seven kids in a car, two in the front seat and four or five in the back, squashed on top of each other and sitting on each others laps, no one wearing a seat belt.  One drunk guy running a red light could have sent us all flying.

As I read this list, I begin to wonder.  Sometimes it is hard to be the trail-blazer letting your kids back into the woods by themselves, when no other parent is letting their kid do the same.  Perhaps I am more fearful of Lord of the Flies type behavior where the kids hurt each other than I am of them getting lost or hassled by a stranger.  While I certainly wish my kids were a little more free-range, maybe I am not as lame as I think I am. I should write about my adrenaline junkie husband and our trip to Whistler last summer.  Zip lining across the Fitzsimmons Creek at some ungodly height on a line that was more than a mile long was one of our adventures.  Mountain biking down a real mountain, where you had to gear up with a motorcycle type helmet with stormtrooper gear.  White water rafting.  And climbing the Grouse Grind.  All of these activities came with multi-page safety disclosures and release agreements.  I have to admit I would have been happier biking along a trail or canoeing.  Oh well.  I suppose that is why there are fathers.  Thanks, Jack, for keeping the kids on the edge.

Full squish mountain biking

But I did get them a dog.  I should get some points for that.