Welcome back to Minor Dilemmas, where a member of Defector's Parents Council will answer your questions on surviving family life. Have a question? Email us at minordilemmas@defector.com.
This week, Drew talks about danger.
Chuck:
One of my proudest achievements as a parent has been teaching my kids to light matches and safely set off cheapo roadside stand fireworks. No Jason Pierre Paul incidents! Can you talk about your approach to teaching manageable risks: teaching them to use knives in the kitchen, going hiking with friends in the mountains and no adult supervision, learning to use a diving board, or maybe riskiest of all, singing karaoke.
I do my best to not show overt worry when I’m teaching them to take mass transit solo in a big city, or use power tools. But it's always nice to compare notes with other parents to find out when they were allowed to do different things, how you dealt with mistakes, and how you killed time waiting for them to return from a mission.
Hey, I taught my kids how to blow stuff up too! Did my wife approve? Barely. But that’s a fairly standard gender dynamic here in the 'burbs. Dad is the gung ho one who wants Junior to live for the danger; mom doesn’t want her children to die. Who’s the more reasonable party in this situation? You’ll only know after the fuse has been lit!
My wife and I agreed a long time ago that we could never shelter our kids entirely from physical danger. We could only mitigate those risks when they were at home, and then be there for support if they blew off a finger or two when they were out in the wild. Most relevant to Chuck’s question: We showed our kids the right way to handle potentially dangerous objects. After all, your job as a parent is to teach your kid how to take care of themselves. That means familiarizing them with all of the shit out there that might kill them—guns, oncoming cars, Republicans—and then modeling how to use and/or manage the dangers they present.
I’ll give you a few examples, starting with fireworks. Many years ago, I bought a value pack of roman candles and the like for July 4th, then invited some friends over to blow them up in our backyard. My youngest son, under 10 at the time, wanted to help. So I set up one of the fireworks in the center of our lawn, told everyone else to stand back, and then walked with him over to the fuse. I knelt down and looked him in the eye—kids always listen better when you’re at eye level with them—and told him the basics. This was a live explosive. We didn’t want to be anywhere near it when it blew up. So he and I would light the fuse together. Once the flame was lit, I told him, we should run like hell away from it. He nodded, and then I spent a solid 10 minutes trying to show him how to use a stick lighter before giving up and telling him I’d do it myself.
Then we lit the fuse and ran. The firework blew up real good, and we were unharmed. Then we repeated the process with the rest of the package, to great success and fanfare. I should note I was drunk during all of this, but I really should be lauded for being such a good role model under adverse circumstances.
I also tried to involve all of our kids in house projects, again starting when they were very young. I had them help me assemble small furniture items from IKEA, jobs that required the occasional hammer or cordless drill. I demonstrated how to hammer a nail into something, then I handed the tool over to them so that they could get a sense of how the hammer felt in their hands. “Feel how heavy it is?” I told them. “You don’t want that landing on your thumb, right?” They said no. Kids fear a crushed thumb as much as you and I do. Because of its weight, you can let the hammer do the hammering for you. You don’t have to swing it like a lunatic, I told them. It’s hard to get any kid to take it easy with any object, so I had to spend a lot of time repeating “easier” to them while guiding them through striking the nail. You do the task together at first, as parent and child, until they get a short-term muscle memory for it. Then you see if they can do it themselves, while remaining extremely close by. You don’t just go out for a coffee and leave them there with a table saw. You teach. Then you supervise until they become both able and confident. Then you let them handle things on their own.
That’s the process, and it applies to pretty much every lesson your child has to learn, dangerous or not. This is how I taught my kids to use kitchen knives. I reminded them that knives are very sharp (they knew this instinctively, but it didn’t hurt to remind them), then I showed them how I chop up a vegetable, holding it with my fingertips curled in so that the knife couldn’t take them off. Given that my wife and I cook all of our meals at home, they were used to seeing us model this sort of knifework in the past. Doing it together was the next step in a gradual learning process.
The key is that all of this teaching has to be hands-on. It’s how I taught my kids to drive, to use the grill outside, and to perform other fraught endeavors. I’ve shown worry during these processes, as has my wife. Of course we have; we’re parents. We don’t want our kids to die or be horribly maimed. But we also know that the best way to keep these kids alive is to get them comfortable both using grown-up equipment and coming to one of us if they sense danger lurking while using it.
Yesterday, my son and his friends decided to make homemade bread. He’s known how to cook for a while now, so I was okay with letting him make food without direct supervision. An hour into the process, he comes into my office and goes, “Uh Dad, we’ve got a problem.” The recipe called for him to heat up an empty dutch oven in the oven. After baking it for a while, the boy smelled something burning, so he came to me to check on the problem and make sure the house wasn’t gonna burn down. Turned out it was a false alarm. I rejiggered the racks inside the oven, told him it was safe to keep going, and then went back to my office. An hour later, the boys turned a fresh loaf of Tuscan bread out onto the counter. It was perfect. I didn’t have to do anything except be there, and I wound up with free bread.
