Truly fearless parenting is a goal in the same way reaching the wall when you’re 20 yards away is in Bikram yoga. If you are not an idiot, you know it’s unreachable. But you still have to try.
I have given up babysitters for my boys, trusting them on their own for hours now when we go out.
But I don’t do so completely fearlessly.
“What if something should happen?” I think before I remember that, well, something could always happen.
So I wave goodbye and blow a kiss as they scurry off to play on the computer.
“Be good boys,” is my last reminder, knowing full well that cramming a bunch of information into the brain and expecting it to stick at the last minute never works.
I leave my boys alone sans the cute young girls for the same reasons highly sought-after research analyst Harry Balzer claims most people do things: because it’s cheaper and easier.
We save hundreds of dollars in babysitting fees with our newfound leave-the-kids-alone strategy, not to mention alleviating the psychic cost of booking the babysitter and hoping she shows.
I also justify the decision because I figure that I have to leave the kids alone someday and someday might as well be now, as my eldest gets ready to go off to middle school. It’s not going to get any easier to trust these tykes to take care of themselves, to heed my hissing warnings when I’m not around to hiss. In fact, it might get harder. I’m hoping practice will make perfect (or at least tolerable) by the time they’re considering deviance on a grand scale.
Besides, the more you sit and stew and imagine the cornucopia of horrors that could befell them if you should leave them to their own devices, the more you create kids who rely on you to make sound decisions for them — who can’t imagine that they can trust themselves.
And that is far scarier than any trouble my boys might get into at this age.
Now, they rebel by eating chocolate chips (sloppily leaving a trail I can call them out on later), or they watch shows on Netflix with a few too many curse words, or they fly down the stairs on couch cushions.
In fact, I am happily oblivious to what they do in the few hours we leave them on their own.
But that’s where the work toward being fearless comes in to play.
I don’t want to be scared of the world I live in and I don’t want my kids to be, either. I don’t want to warn them profusely not to answer the door or the phone, or not to talk to strangers, and build up their expectation that something scary should happen.
I may be a fool, but I want them to imagine the world as a mostly friendly place.
And crime usually happens with people we already know, a statistic that has severely diminished my belief in “stranger danger” to a trace amount.
My kids are understandably thrilled when we go out. They have sleepovers with the friends whose fearless parents are on board offering such freedom. The kids get gleam in their eye when they ask what time we’re leaving, and when we’ll be back.
When I see that gleam, I sometimes make the idle threat to call a babysitter, but instead slowly leave while reassuring myself that I hae made the right decision.
“REACH for the wall, REACH for it,” I’ll whisper in my head like I do at yoga class. “Fearless, fearless. All I can do is try.”
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