Teaching Kids Risk Assessment for Climbing and for Life
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As I talk about in the video, I get a lot of “parenting advice” about having my kids outdoors, deep in the backcountry, and taking on tasks that some people would view as risky. While I certainly wish that wasn’t the case, I’m also not surprised. In fact, it was one of the things I was expecting so deeply that it almost stopped me from creating this channel: I wasn’t sure I wanted to subject myself and my family to that. (You can learn more about why I went through with it, anyway, by checking out our entry titled Climbing, Mountaineering, Backpacking, & Camping with Parenthood, YouTube, Cancer, & Mental Health.)
I can get why people want to impose a particular value set and world view onto someone else. For some, yes, it may be egotistic or short-sighted, but for others I think it’s genuinely an attempt to help out and point us away from a path that they honestly feel is a bit too much.
But for me, one of the lessons I’m learning as I age - as I grow away from the seeming invincibility of youth - is that we really don’t control risks. We tilt risks more or less in our favor through careful analysis and meaningful action. And as I’ve hit a season in my life that is as challenging as any I have ever faced (again, see Climbing, Mountaineering, Backpacking, & Camping with Parenthood, YouTube, Cancer, & Mental Health), I find myself turning again and again to the lessons about risk that the mountains have taught me. As my personal struggles have become more real, the benefits of my climbs have actually increased because I have a whole set of difficult circumstances (from which difficult lessons were learned) from which I can draw. What was a “cool” climb in my youth is now a lesson applied to life’s uncertainties.
So, I’ve come to value my exposure to risk. That doesn’t mean that I want to take huge risks nor take risks all of the time; either option would increase my relative risk to points beyond my comfort. But it does mean that training myself to think about risk has been incredibly helpful as I apply it to the rest of my life.
That makes is something I want to pass on to my kids. I want them to think about risks and actively manage them. I think it’s important to prepare our mentality and our assessment skills to think reasonably and rationally about things like - oh I don’t know - maybe a Global Pandemic, or cancer, or a severe injury that may demand a lifestyle change. How do we confront these things in life? It probably does and should vary from person to person, but I like having an approach to this “no right answer” questions that life sometimes throw at us.
Now, what I am currently teaching my kids, and what is outlined in the video, isn’t sophisticated enough to handle those adult-level vagaries, but it is a starting point. If you’ve seen my video about habits, you know that I am a big believer in exercising routines of thought, physicality, and emotion in order to craft ourselves into more of who we want to become. Well, this is the start of one of those habits. It’s a rudimentary framework and a rudimentary vocabulary for risk… but it’s the start of a systematic way of approaching risk as a life skill, not just a climbing skill.