Did you hear the one about the parents who took two toddlers on a 36-foot sailboat and started to go around the world? It sounds like the start of a joke, but it’s not.
Charlotte and Eric Kaufman made international headlines when they needed to be rescued at sea with their 1- and 3-year-old daughters 900 miles off the coast of Mexico last week.
In the midst of the drama surrounding their plight — the youngest girl was sick, an Air National Guard rescue team parachuted to the boat — parents around the world condemned them for risking their children’s lives.
The truth is, parents have for centuries dragged their kids along into the unknown. They have done it out of fear, passion, and the pursuit of a meaningful life. It’s called being a family and is totally different from allowing your children to take risks on their own.
If either of my daughters had wanted to take up drag racing at the age of 10, they would have been out of luck. But if we, as a family, moved to Antarctica, I admit my girls wouldn’t have had much choice in the matter.
This is not about risks. Families take risks and face unforeseen dangers all the time. Years ago, there was the family that pulled off the highway in Los Angeles and ended up in a gang-infested neighborhood on a dead-end street. They were shot at, and one girl was killed in the ensuing violence. There is also the story of the Kim family, who took a wrong turn, got stranded in the mountains of Oregon where the father died. These are situations where normal life turns horribly wrong.
My family made the choice to move to Brooklyn from New Hampshire. No real risks were involved, but we chose between two very different lifestyles and dragged my then 1-year-old girl along with us. Should I have gone before a review board to defend this decision? What if I was taking my family to another country, or to live in the mountains off the grid?
I remember reading my kids “The Little House in the Big Wood,” a fictionalized account of Laura Ingalls Wilder’s childhood in the wilds of Wisconsin. By today’s standards, this was a brutal life, but families choose this path now as missionaries, diplomats, aid workers, and sailors, heading to places where what we consider adequate medical care doesn’t exist. Should those parents go before some review board to defend their choice?
When I worry about Long Island College Hospital closing and the possible risk my family will face from the additional minutes it will take to get to a hospital, it is easy to forget that in most of the world, access to care is hours or days away, and an infected cut can mean disfigurement, horrible disease, or even death. Does this mean I shouldn’t be allowed to take my children to these places?
The Kaufmans have a passion and they built their family’s life around the sea. They prepared, they practiced, and they failed. That doesn’t make them bad parents — just bad sailors.
