Teaching Children That Safety is a Verb

Riding bikes was the general mode of transportation in my youth. I had a bright yellow banana seat and a basket with daisies on it. I went everywhere I was allowed and a lot of places I wasn’t. I don’t remember having to dodge cars. I was just looking for the next big hill, so I could lift my feet up and cruise down with the wind in my hair – I didn’t wear a helmet and most of time I didn’t even hold on to the handlebars. If there was something to be afraid of, I didn’t know about it. I just took things as they came.

Now days, we teach our children to be afraid of what might be around the bend. Thanks to all the ‘if it bleeds, it leads’ media, we’ve forgotten the fact that things could actually be okay. We've lost trust in the kindness of strangers. We assume people are all out for themselves and will run you down just so they can make the light. That kind of myopic thinking leaves our children in a precarious position. They’ve grown up believing to feel safe, they need to just stay in safe places. But where’s that? Many think it’s at home next to their computer or with a big group at a neighborhood park. Others might even go so far as to think it’s anywhere a parent is. Unfortunately, that doesn’t teach them to be safe. Safety should really be taught as if it was a verb.

Last year, when Lenore Skenazy, confessed in a New York Sun article, “Why I Let My 9-year old Son Ride the Subway Alone”, there was a huge uproar. Her son didn’t have a cell phone. She didn’t follow him around to make sure he made good decisions. She left him completely alone and (the public flogged her saying it had to have been a miracle) he got home safe. Though deemed America’s Worst Mom, I think she tapped into a major teachable moment. How are we ever going to let our kids know they have the power to keep themselves safe if we don’t let them practice it? Skenazy said it’s hard for people to define risk these days especially when it comes to our children. I agree. I would go so far as to say, we’ve become obsessed with catastrophic thinking at the expense of allowing our children to use their own instincts and good sense.

Remember when you were nine? Why is it so different now, because we’ve allowed the media to scare us into thinking it is? It isn’t. Some of the worst murders happened in 1800’s, read “Devil in the White City”, by Erik Larson. There is and will be bad people and tragedy always and forever. More important, there will always be good people and magic. Our children deserve to feel that. They deserve to know their own power to trust their instincts in navigating through the unknown.

I always felt it was important to teach my son that life is about change, and about learning to be flexible enough to move through it without breaking. I also believe it’s good to teach there are some things you can count on, like your own ability to sense danger, to get through unfamiliar territory, and to keep yourself safe. Yes terrible things could happen, but we are so quick to forget that things do go right a lot of the time. Like Dr. Seuss says in All the Thinks You Can Think, “You can think about left. Or you can think about right. You can think about that until Saturday night.”