During the familiar, ritualistic finger-pointing that followed the tragic death of Jessica Dubroff, San Francisco Chronicle columnist Joan Ryan came to this conclusion: “The basic responsibility of parents is not to give our children love…The basic responsibility is to keep our children safe.”
Ryan spoke for many adults who were outraged by what seemed to be the senseless death of a bright, charming little girl. Jessica was seven, and she wanted to be a pilot. Even more, she wanted to be the youngest person to pilot a plane across the U.S. And her parents allowed her to try.
When the news broke that Jessica’s plane had crashed upon takeoff one stormy spring morning in 1996, love was not the only thing sent to the bottom of the parental priority list. Self-determination, bravery, adventure, even dreams were widely thought to be trivial considerations in comparison with personal safety. The public furor over this accident was not soothed by the appearance of Jessica’s mother on the Today show. Instead of demonstrating the remorse that was expected of her and that might, eventually, earn her the forgiveness of the nation, Lisa Hathaway declared that she would do it all over again - because a life that was free was more important than a life that was merely long. Hathaway concluded that her basic responsibility was to provide her child with the means to follow her dreams, however great the likelihood of danger.
So why do I bring this up now, when six years of new horrors and atrocities have pushed Jessica’s story completely out of our minds?
Simply this: because the question raised then - “What is more important, safety or freedom?” - has been before us in a very real way ever since the hijacking of four planes a year ago. During this summer’s media frenzy over child abductions, the question has become very personal, but it’s still the same question. And maybe the way we answer it as parents has a lot to do with how we answer it as a nation.
Taken to an extreme, both Ryan’s philosophy and that of Hathaway will lead to fairly appalling results. Real parenting is too full of contradictions for there to be one definitive and absolute responsibility that is our primary task. We need to teach our children to share their red yoyo while simultaneously assuring them that they have rights, among which is the right not to share their red yoyo. We need to teach them to be open and friendly, but not too friendly, nor too open. We need to provide them with a sense of order while simultaneously teaching that there is an exception to every rule.
The issue of child safety is no less contradictory than any of the other goals that seem so desirable until we realize their price. We can place boundaries that will minimize the dangers that our children must face, but if enough room is not left for them to exercise their own judgment, they won’t be able to deal with life’s challenges themselves. Like a muscle supported too long with a brace, they’ll grow gradually weaker. They’ll be safe, but sorry.
A parent’s job is much more difficult than either Ryan or Hathaway was willing to admit. Because what we really need to do is not to watch our children like hawks every second until they reach legal adulthood, any more than it is to allow them to charge into every danger unchecked by parental discretion. No, we have to perform an instant cost/benefit analysis at every turn in their lives, to weigh out when we absolutely must intervene in our children’s decisions, and when we must not.
Some of these analyses are easy. I would certainly prefer to teach my kindergartner to use caution while crossing the street, for instance, rather than wait for her to learn that lesson the hard way. The likelihood of her suffering the cost (being flattened by a speeding vehicle) far outweighs any possible benefit of being permitted to dash gaily across the street. But many choices are much harder to make, particularly for parents who are, like me, customarily over-cautious.
For instance, recently a friend invited us to go sailing with her family. The lake was a little choppy, but we would be in the hands of a very experienced sailor, and my children had never been on a sailboat. We went.
The sky and the water were blue, the city sparkled, the sunset was a rosy-red “sailor’s delight.” No one threw up. It was beautiful. My kids clamored over the boat from stem to stern; they would have climbed the rigging to the crow’s nest, had there been one. And I chased them around with one finger looped in the waistband of a life jacket, one hand on the rail.
But as we headed back toward the marina, my almost-seven-year-old son pleaded to be allowed to go forward to the bow with no grown-up, presumably to scan the horizon for his pirate foe and feel the salt spray upon his sun-parched brow. After avoiding the question for a few minutes, I said, jokingly, trying to laugh the matter off, “My heart would be happier if you stayed here by me.” He thought about that answer and replied quite soberly, “But my heart would be happier if I went.”
Which was more important, the happiness of his heart, or mine? His freedom, or his safety?
Caution is a fine thing when we’re much more certain that a choice will lead to sorrow than to joy. But it’s only one of the tools in our belt. The problem with relying on it as the only device by which we calculate our decisions is that we often can’t know what benefits we’ve accrued by using it, while we may imagine with some certainty what happiness it might have lead us to forfeit. To parent skillfully, we need to depend more on other tools - like courage and trust - and teach our children how to use them wisely, too.