Sailing solo at 16; running daily at 9: The risks we allow and the risks we reject for our kids

I’ve been thinking about 16-year-old California teen Abby Sunderland ever since she was in the headlines earlier this month for aborting her solo sail mission, but I’d resisted writing about her because I kept asking myself why anyone would care what I thought about this story. Weighing in seemed to me like a perfect example of blog-abuse – just because you have a (self-bestowed) platform doesn’t mean you need to use it.

But the story stuck with me despite the fact that I know almost nothing about sailing and my children are (or seem to me) still very far from sixteen. Today while out running, I listened to a podcast of NPR’s Talk of the Nation that featured a debate about this very same story, and finally I understood why it resonated.

Specifically, it was when Outside Magazine contributing editor Bruce Barcott, who was arguing in favor of the Sunderlands’ decision to let their daughter sail solo (while Leonard Pitts of the Miami Herald represented the opposing view), said that “the Sunderlands are…extreme examples of what I call brave parenting. But I think that they help us reflect on the boundaries that we put around our kids.” Barcott went on to talk about how the Sunderlands represent the opposite of helicopter parents, those prototypical peers of mine who worry about the size of hot dog slices versus the diameter of a child’s trachea and who fear abductors around every corner. Leonard Pitts then responded, “I agree with the idea that we are in era of helicopter parenting and parents who are too eager to wrap their kids in bubble wrap before they send them out into the world. But I think that there is a little bit of a gulf between…over-parenting and sending a child out on to the middle of the Indian Ocean. It seems to me that there's a happy medium somewhere in there that is being lost.”

A happy medium. That’s what rang a bell in my mind. Because when I first heard about the Sunderlands, my initial thought was “Oh good, parents who make me look vigilant.” A happy medium. That’s where I was, I thought to myself as I ran. That’s what I was doing in late summer of 2007 when I asked my then almost 9-year-old if he wanted to take on a challenge: run a mile or more every day for a year.

He did, and in a story I’ve recounted many times since then, Tim and I ran a mile or more every single day for two years. Running a daily mile is not one whit like sailing across the Indian Ocean, but there were parents who thought was I was doing was crazy too, just as many people (including me) now think about the Sunderlands. When I posted about Tim’s and my running goals on a message board dedicated to runners, other posters accused me of fostering obsessive-compulsive disorder in my son. “You’re setting up an impossible standard that he’s forcing himself to meet just to please you,” more than one of them wrote in some form or another. “A nine-year-old should not be running every day,” wrote another avid runner.

Despite the fact that my husband, myself and our pediatrician saw nothing wrong with this goal as long as it was Tim’s choice, some parents reacted as if I was, well, sending my son out into the Indian Ocean.

And I did worry about whether it was a reasonable thing to do, just as I’ve worried throughout both of my kids’ entire lives thus far because I tend to be a little less anxious than other parents. I let my 7-year-old play at the playground all the way across the ballfield when I’m watching my son play baseball. I allow the kids to walk together to the general store while I’m at the library across the street. Earlier this spring on the bike path, two different sets of adults admonished me that I was letting my daughter bike too far ahead of me. So there’s no doubt that I’ve taken my share of flak for my un-helicopter attitude over the years, most notably when my decision to let my two-year-old sleep in a (locked) car while I walked 300 yards away to pick up her older brother at school inspired a passer-by to call 911.

So I’ve learned to question my own judgment. With the daily running project, which Tim kept up for a total of 732 days – two years, one of which was a leap year, plus one extra day for good measure – I was vigilant about never urging him to go. The running had to be his choice, every single day, every time we went out. But again and again, he chose to go. He seized the challenge. And yes, he was the only 9-year-old we knew who was committed to a daily running streak. But it didn’t hurt him any. It wasn’t as tough as sailing across the ocean, but it wasn’t easy either. He ran on frigid days and in heat waves, in thunderstorms and blizzards. But it was a challenge he found satisfying, for every day of those two years. And it was something I never once told him he had to do for anyone else’s sake. It was always his choice.

I worried that if anything were to go wrong, I’d have to live with the guilt as well as the grief. When I was in college, a 12-year-old in our town went running on a summer day, then collapsed and died of heart failure at the end of his driveway. If something like that happened to Tim, I’d have to cope not only with the overpowering grief any parent would feel but the knowledge that it was undeniably my fault.

Abby Sunderland’s parents must have had thoughts similar to these. As Leonard Pitts stated on Talk of the Nation, the sailing venture was in a league of its own in terms of the danger it incurred upon her rescuers as well as the expense it caused. Nothing about the running streak included either of those factors.

But the story reminded me too that every parent makes decisions about risks. My decisions seemed extreme to many of my peers; the Sunderlands’ choices seem one hundred times more extreme to me than anything I’ve ever done. Parenting is about judgment calls, from the first time you let your infant sleep on his stomach because it’s the only way he can fall asleep to the day you let your teen go on a ski trip with a friend. Making those decisions is part of how we learn and grow as parents, and teaching our kids to evaluate the risks and benefits of any decision that concerns them is one of the lessons we pass on by our own example every time we do.