My eight-year-old is always climbing something he shouldn’t.
This is not a metaphor. There is, at any given moment, a specific thing – a wall, a tree, a structure that was clearly not designed for children – that he is either currently climbing or has recently climbed or is calculating how to climb.
For a long time, my response to this was to stop him.
Not always, of course, but often enough that he learned to check where I was before he started.
I’m not sure when I gave in and stopped stopping him. It wasn’t a decision, exactly. More like a gradual shift in what I did with my own anxiety – which didn’t go away, but which I started to look at slightly differently.
There is a version of this conversation that is about statistics. About how safe the world actually is. About how our sense of danger is calibrated by the worst-case scenarios we encounter most often – in news, in warnings, in other parents’ fear – rather than by the actual likelihood of things going wrong. About how the brain stores the one terrible story and uses it to assess every situation, regardless of how unrepresentative that story is for happenings in the real world.
All of that is true. And yet none of it helps when your eight-year-old is fifteen feet up something and the branch looks questionable.
The statistics are real, and they are also not the point of my story. The point is learning to tell the difference between fear that is telling you something useful and fear that is just fear.
That is much harder than it sounds, and it is not something you do once.
What I started to notice when I stepped back
When I stepped back – when I decided to watch instead of stop – a few things happened.
The first was that he slowed down.
This was the thing I didn’t expect. I had assumed that if I wasn’t there to limit things, he would go higher, faster, further. But he didn’t. He went carefully. He tested the branch before he put his weight on it. He looked at the route down before he committed to the route up.
He was doing the risk assessment. He just needed me to stop doing it for him.
The second thing I noticed was the coming down.
Not the climbing – the moment after. When he got back to the ground and turned around. Something in his face that isn’t there at the end of a directed activity or a managed experience. A specific quality of having done something real, by himself, that he wasn’t certain he could do. It’s a quality he would never find in the easy version. It only comes from the version where there was genuine uncertainty, that he resolved it himself.
The third thing I noticed – and this took longer, months rather than days – was that he fell less. And it wasn’t because he stopped taking risks. He got better at assessing them. He had more information about what his body could do, and he used it. The recklessness I’d been afraid of was, it turned out, partly a product of inexperience. And inexperience is only resolved by experience.
The harder part: getting rid of my own fear
None of this makes it comfortable to watch him do it, of course. The anxiety doesn’t go away once you understand what it is. You still feel it. You still have to make the judgment call, every time, about whether this specific situation is one where something is actually wrong or one where you’re just scared.
Getting that judgment right requires knowing your child – which you do, better than anyone. It requires paying attention – which you are, even when you look like you’re sitting calmly on a bench. It requires accepting that you will sometimes get it wrong in the direction of too much, and sometimes in the direction of too little, and that this is the nature of the thing rather than a failure of it.
What it doesn’t require is getting rid of the fear. You are just learning not to act on it every time.
My boy still climbs things he shouldn’t.
Last week he was most of the way up a tree that I would describe as ambitious before he decided, himself, that it was enough and came down.
I was watching, but I didn’t say anything.
And he didn’t look over to check where I was.
That last part is new.