My position on parents endangering young children by seeking “all-time youngest” records for them and forcing them into unnecessarily dangerous recreational activities the kids can’t possibly understand or consent to is, I fear, unalterable. (Above is the 1996 wreck of the plane piloted by 7-year-old Jessica Dubroff, whose parents had her attempting to become the youngest trainee pilot to fly a light aircraft across the United States. Local, national, and international news media cheered on Dubroff’s story until she, her training pilot and her father died in the crash. )

However outdoors enthusiast Sarah B. mounted as strong a case against my position as I can imagine, in two successive comments combined here as Sarah B.’s Comment of the Day on the post, “Not This Issue Again! Arrest These Parents For Child Endangerment, Please…”:

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I think there may be a misunderstanding on how Wyoming papers handle kid stories which I think changes a few things.

In small towns like most of Wyoming (not the urban hell that is Casper, Cheyenne, or Laramie), a story with a kid gets written long before a story about Bud Light and Dylan Mulvaney. I made the front page of our local paper at least a half dozen times as a kid, and made the paper dozens of times. Every year, the middle school and high school band/choir concerts would make the front page the day after they were held. If you consider that we did three concerts a semester for each of band and choir in high school, and two concerts a semester for each of middle school band and choir, that is ten days where the kids make the front page each school year. The high school homecoming royalty would make the front page on Thursday after the Wednesday reveal, the parade would always make front page on Friday, the game on Saturday, with the dance making page two. Prom was front page material. When four kids from our school got the best scholarship to the University of Wyoming one year, we made the front page. Every semester honor roll for every level of school made about third page. Placing in a math competition, debate competition, etc would always get a name in the paper, usually a picture too, and often on the front page. High school sports covered the front page every week.

I say this to emphasize my belief that this shouldn’t be considered as bad as you think. Newspapers gush over “youngest” this and “oldest” that. It makes people read the paper. National news is a page six or eight item and international news, like a war between Ukraine and Russia, is usually found below the fold on the comics page, under the Sudoku and Dear Abby.

People want the stories with the kids. Front page news is preferred to have a picture of a kid. A kid doing something good, like winning the coupon for a free pizza at the drawing at the library book fair, is a great front page story. Getting to the top of Devil’s Tower is just as good, and should be considered with the same gravity.

This is just standard newspaper fodder, nothing to get so excited about.

As for your issue with climbing, what activities do you consider out of the normal, with too much risk? Many people consider high school football to be normal and I know that you agree with me that it has too much risk. Is biking normal? What about hiking? Camping? Bouldering (certainly a normal thing in my rural childhood) is a difference in scale, not kind to climbing. Horseback riding? Boating? Fishing? Hunting? What is a normal activity that families do with kids that I don’t list here? These are all the norm where I grew up.

I think that this is another cultural difference between urban and rural USA. Having kids do fun things with an element of risk is considered to be good parenting in most of the rural areas I know. If you cannot learn to handle risk with your parents watching over you, especially at a young age, you will never handle risk well is the argument. There are studies that support this, not that they should matter. Going hiking, climbing, horseback riding, etc are all considered to be good healthy activities that you tend to do better at the younger you do them. We take our kids hiking and camping, because there is an element of risk. Generally items that do not force us to combat risk do not involve personal growth, and the duty of parents is to guide their children’s personal growth. Theatre, your passion, tends to be too far away (four hours one way) and expensive for us. We have different values, because we really do live in different worlds.

I take far more issue with people having private pools than climbing a mountain. I believe that there is more concern from school sports than a parent guided climb. Devil’s Tower, at least the trail they used, would not be my first choice, but according to the article, it wasn’t their first choice either. They had been doing this for three years. Whether or not she made it up under her own power, she did make it to the top. She got to look out over the plains from the top of Devil’s Tower, and that’s pretty cool. If this tempts the family into doing stupid stuff like climbing K2, well, that’s a problem, but until then, it is merely a fun activity, as far as I’m concerned.

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I responded in part,

“6? SIX? Try this as a thought experiment: if, seconds after that photo on the right, the clasp had shattered due to a manufacturing flaw (or a parent had failed to secure the girl properly) and she had fallen to a bloody death, would the media be defending the parents? Would an age limit on climbers not be immediately installed—maybe even a law? There is no reason to subject a young, trusting, completely inexperienced and dependent child to even a small risk of death or serious injury with such speculative benefits.…”

My point, which I didn’t make clear, was that a tragic result of this story would have immediately made everyone slap their heads and say, “What was I thinking? Of COURSE letting a 6-year-old child do this is irresponsible, because no child should die, ever engaging in a purely gratuitous and needless activity with the risk of serious injury involved.” Sarah, quite properly, turned to my usual “moral luck” point…

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You are letting the outcome of an action determine whether or not the action is good. The chances of that happening are extremely slim. I have never seen the movie, but I do know that when you climb, you check your equipment long before you reach this kind of stressor for exactly that reason. Would the media still be happy? No. Would they be extolling the kid or the parents? No. Would they be crying for more stupid laws? They always do. Should they? No. Should we care what the media thinks? Absolutely not. I do doubt an age limit would be imposed on climbers. Devil’s Tower is closer to Newcastle than Jackson, and most of the non-Cheyenne/Jackson/Laramie populace believes, if something stupid happens, well, we will be sorry, but we don’t generally believe in legislating our problems away.

We check our climbing equipment for a reason. Properly maintained and monitored equipment fails very rarely. It is far more likely for us to be injured or killed when being driven to the doctor’s office. We still drive to the doctor’s office. The risk at climbing is negligible when compared to putting your kid in a car, but you want parents to feel bad about what is a normal activity.

As I have pondered this response most of the day, I think that we look at dangers differently in a rural community. First, the park next to the Kindergarten/First Grade building is a home to rattlesnakes. They pull a half a dozen or so monsters out of there a month. There is a warning when you go to the park that rattlesnakes have been seen here recently, but it is the nicest or second nicest park in town. The other parks are not much better for snakes, so we just know to teach our kids from a very young age how to be safe around rattlers. You can’t just say, there will be no rattlesnakes in the parks. It won’t happen without changing the entire community. Mountain lions don’t come through town every year, but they do come frequently. A neighbor a few houses down from my dad had a cougar prowling on her garage for several days before animal control found out how to get it down with no fatalities. The fact that it didn’t attack anyone was pretty much a miracle. My town has herds of deer that wander through. If a deer sneaks up on you and gets mad or scared, you can get killed. They jump over whatever fences they want and kill dogs every year. We all know that kids are at special risk if the deer are around, and they often are. I personally had 18 deer on my lawn at one time. If a kid gets snake bit, the hospital can’t deal with that crap. They can only rehydrate, set bones, and give stitches. Anything else gets life-flighted to Denver.

They can’t even deliver babies. We have to drive 100 miles while in labor to have a baby. One day, when I was out of town, my husband had appendicitis. He drove himself 120 miles to have it removed. This is how life works out here, and this is in one of the larger towns in Wyoming. Most smaller towns are more remote, and they don’t have hospitals as nice as ours. They are far more accustomed to having an NP or two who sees people three to four days a week for minor ailments and sends you on down the road to get an X-ray when your kid falls down the stairs.

This tends to breed a hardy populace. We tend to, as a populace, have the opinion that shit happens. When something that has a low chance of happening goes wrong and someone dies, it is tragic, but it is a fact of life. We don’t try and legislate pain away, nor do we say that small risks are too big. If we didn’t go hunt, fish, camp, etc with our kids, what would we do with them?

I don’t think that it is unethical to raise children to love and live in the wild. The wild is safer than town, usually. The predators here are easily scared off. Cars drive far more carefully and are less likely to hit someone. You are forced by mother nature to pay attention to what goes on around you, and the greater attention you pay, the less risks you have. When we are in a creek or lake, not only do we have flotation aids that are missing in a swimming pool, but we also do not have kids crawling all over, hiding a silent drowning with their antics. Falls hurt, but they are just as likely at home. Relative risk is king. Very few things we do routinely are more dangerous than driving or riding in a car, but we do that multiple times a day. Most of these activities are far safer for our children than riding in a car.

I recently had a relative die while camping. He was sitting in a manicured lot, under a tree that gets scrutinized multiple times a year by arborists. The tree was dead and snapped, pinning him in his wheelchair and tearing him up badly. If he had been in a city park, the chances of that happening would have been no higher than it was out in the wilderness. They called the local ambulance from a town 30 miles away and after checking him out, loaded him on a helicopter to Billings. If he had been in town, five miles down the road from the wilderness area, they would have called the local ambulance from the town 25 miles away, and after checking him out, loaded him on a helicopter to Billings. There is no difference.

I was not joking about these activities and a six year old. You talk about the excesses of the Vogels, who went way too far, but biking is a great family activity for children as young as 3 months with a proper seat and a helmet. Hiking is something that you can start having kids enjoy as young as about a year if you plan to carry them. I have hiked my children as young as four who have done 5 miles at 10,000 feet. There is no substantial risk. Camping is not done in the backyard, it is done in the wilderness, usually at as young as three months. I don’t know what the risk is here either. Given that my kids, at three or four, climb trees, bouldering seems far safer. Most boulders are way closer to the ground than tree branches. I looked away to pull some weeds from away from the pepper plants for a moment and my four year old recently was at about six or seven feet up my tree. I’m less concerned by a three or four foot boulder. Kids can die while horseback riding, but that is uncommon and horseback riding is a great skill for kids to learn. Many kids also milk cows and help herd sheep at six.

I’m not kidding about hunting. Setting aside when a kid should have their own gun, kids do not shoot animals at six. Many families don’t even use guns to kill their animals. My parents prefer to use bows. But what do you do with your kids when you go get your meat for the year? Do you just leave them home alone? A six year old is perfectly capable sitting in the field, or for a very high energy kid, perhaps mom stays at the tent during dawn and dad stays at dusk, so each get the chance to shoot their animal. Besides, when kids come, they get to learn about life and death, not to mention anatomy and how to field dress an animal. When you have watched an animal die so that you can eat, I think you have far more appreciation of the necessities of life than a kid who just goes to the grocery store to watch mom grab a pack of chicken breasts. You also learn a lot about an animal when you have to stalk it so that you can kill it. These experiences are healthy, as long as you use a smidgen of common sense and don’t be stupid about it.

If these fairly safe activities are too dangerous for a six year old, what, in all seriousness, is an acceptable “kid activity” in your mind?