Kicking Fear-Based Parenting to the Curb
if one more Instagram-mom tells me the slide's going to kill my kids, I'll scream
Last summer, I was starting to think I was kind of a freak.
I mentioned to a friend—like, an actual friend, whose Starbucks order I know—that my son had an upcoming sailing race. My son was 7 years old at the time, and he’s been in sailing since he was five (my husband was in the recreational sailing club in college; our university was on a lake and sailing was an extremely popular activity). Wisconsin has over 15,000 lakes, and I consider that to be one of its very best traits. My eldest regularly competes in local youth regattas and has sailed around the small, calm lake by our house solo twice before (solo in the boat—his coach was supervising from another boat.)
My friend, however, was slightly horrified. “You just put him in a boat?!” she said, almost hysterically. “By himself?”
I laughed, because this is a person I love, who I didn’t mind free flowing opinions from. I explained to her that he has a life jacket on the entire time, and that he knows how to swim, and that he’s in a small little Opti, and that his lifeguard-certified coach would be no more than 10 yards or so away1. Also, it’s not exactly the Pacific Ocean or Lake Michigan.
She wasn’t convinced.
I shook it off. But then, a week or so later, I was in a room filled with friends when I said how badly I wanted to send that same son to summer camp. You would’ve thought I suggested shipping him out to the US Army’s basic training. Just leave him?! For a week?!?
And then, someone I knew less well was shocked—shocked—to learn that I had a teenage babysitter coming over to watch my three wild things so my husband and I could stuff our faces with movie theater popcorn. She literally said, and I quote, “I just can’t imagine not being the one who puts my kids to bed, with all of the molestation statistics around babysitters and all.” (I’m not sure which statistics she was referring to—clearly not the ones that say babysitters are responsible for .5% of crimes against juveniles, or the ones that say the most likely people to molest your children, far and away, are yourself or your husband.)
And then, just a couple of weeks ago, someone I know *even less* made a slight comment about my kids playing in the backyard by themselves. It wasn’t exactly mean, but it was curious and slightly judgey. Particularly, she was concerned about my almost-3-year-old. Nearly the entire back of our house is windows, and I was washing dishes while watching the kids outside. I had instructed her brother (the rebellious sailor) to keep an eye on her and not let her leave the backyard, and they were nowhere near the road—they were chasing a soccer ball right up next to our house. I literally had both eyes on them, and she’d periodically look up to wave at me through the window.
