To Walk Alone

It is just 400 metres. Just.

But it is the walk to school and as much as I want my son to develop the independence he would have in walking himself to school, it ain’t 1972 (when I walked half the distance and crossed only one street rather than three) to get to school when I was in kindergarten. Another factor that may have influenced that was the challenge my mother would have faced of dressing my younger brothers to get them out the door to do the walk along with me.

He made his request to walk to school on his own and, as is often the case, a resolution of sorts emerged before the day was out. Unfortunately, it merely happened to be an opportunity to cop out rather than take the topic as far as we could. The out of school care (OOSC) program he is in, coincidentally enough, sent out an email a few hours after his request to me. In the email, they reiterated their need for the kids to be logged in when they arrive for they day. They did not, however, make it explicit that it was the parents’ responsibility. If I wanted to close down the discussion, I could say that OOSC wants or needs his mother or I to log him in and out when we drop him off and pick him up.  

I want him to have this responsibility and the trust, confidence and independence that would go with it but now it is something that requires a great deal of negotiation with his school, or the OOSC program. It is quite easy to say that times have changed but the institutions have girded themselves with such rigorous caution against liabilities. My wheels are already turning about the negotiations that I could have with either the school or OOSC to discuss him going on his own and, at OOSC, logging himself in. There is a strong possibility that older kids in the program walk themselves there and log themselves in.

For about 2 1/2 years I have walked my son to and from daycare regularly and we put our steps in throughout the week to other destinations, so covering the distance is not a factor and at every intersection my loop of "look both ways, watch the cars" has played incessantly. He actually stops and waves cars through ahead of him, so I now have to coach him up a bit on asserting his own rights at an intersection but at least he is erring on the side of caution. For the third street crossing he has a well-worn pedestrian overpass that takes the concerns of looking both ways out of the equation. At this point, though, I find it frustrating that I have to rationalize this brief walk to the extent that I do because it is unsupervised.

I am confident that the risks, if any, are minimal and that the consciousness of stranger-danger or traffic are in part a factor of our collective fears, being normalized rather than mitigated. The only other people I see when I walk him to OOSC or school are another parent who lives on the same floor on me taking her daughter, and two cyclists coming north on the sidewalk and prompting me to squish to my left as my son walks the top edge of a low cinder block wall he climbs every morning. I know this walk.

There seems to have been a trade-off between low-probability tragedy and in favour of the guaranteed loss of independence and autonomy, not to mention a higher probability risk of a child getting hit by a car given the number of parents drive their kids to school now. There is also the spectre of parent-shaming looming on this matter of letting a child venture out on their own.  It is easy to say that it is not that much time each day for a parent to drop off their kids and it is a good time for my son and I talk each day.  The city, however, is not as dangerous as we convince ourselves it is and having my son develop the skills to navigate himself through the city on foot or by transit are things that would give him the autonomy that I had when I was his age.

When I raised this with him on our walk home he had forgotten about it but I doubt that it will be for long. I will likely wait until it is light in the mornings again and venture carefully toward ramping him up toward this walk or similar walks and assure myself that he can do it and assure him that I want to give him this independence.

The Acrophobe's Son

My own issue with heights can be traced to the nefarious influence of Looney Tunes cartoons.  I was walking up the stairs in our home as a 3- or 4-year-old and tried to climb them in the same way that Tweety Bird - lacking my length of limb - made use of both arms (ahem wings) and feet to scramble onto each individual step.  After succeeding on enough steps to get near the top, I shed whatever vigilance it took to keep all four limbs strategically placed on a step and... down the whole flight I rolled.  I don't believe I sobbed or anything that brought attention to my Chuck Jones influenced effort. I just swallowed my pride and walked up the steps upright, with a new fear firmly embedded and a dollop of playfulness gone.

Since that time, the legs quake at certain precipices, oblivious to the minor feats of engineering that will undoubtedly assure my safety - as I have often been told. I have kept my feet away from trapdoors in the floors of cable cars. I have steered clear of the view from skyscraper windows. I white-knuckled through a flight in my uncle's float plane Cessna in 1984 and gulped watermelon-down-the-throat-hard when he released the controls and told me to take over as the plane dipped.

If one needs evidence that opposites attract, exhibit A would be my wife: mountain girl. Born and raised in the Rocky vistas of Canmore, Alberta, she has had a long affinity for the mountains and her own long, unscarring history of rock-climbing - both indoors and out.  Gabriel has often demonstrated his mother's indifference to heights while I on a regular basis white knuckle from a distance at his forays up monkey bars or the other apparatus that catch his eye at the playground.

For the last month, he has been able to up the ante with participation in a more structured rock-climbing class.  He had been a little skittish about the climbing great heights during the first few weeks, rarely climbing any higher than two or three metres off the ground.  Each session my wife and I would watch as he climbed about two metres up the wall and called out, "Down." We would talk to the class instructor and she assured us that he was making progress. Gabriel would assure us that he was not afraid of heights and last week he boasted that he made it to the very top of the wall - an assertion of pride that went unchallenged despite the evidence to the contrary.

We had resigned ourselves to not signing him up for another class given his reluctance to get too far from solid ground but on the last night of the class he made steady progress up the wall.  My concerns that my anxieties were being transmitted to him finally abated and I applauded and fist-pumped to him as he beamed up from the floor after his belay to solid ground.  Meanwhile, my legs quaked as the waifs scrambled up and down the walls.  I had seen enough and I retired to a chair in the hallway and buried my nose in a book.