ÎÚÑ»´«Ã½

Your kid can’t walk into a liquor store and get a six-pack. There are laws against selling cigarettes to minors. And while it might be really stupid to allow young kids to swim in a lake on their own, it’s not prohibited. These are parenting judgment calls. And, in case you hadn’t noticed, parents are rarely all in agreement on anything.

And even if we could decide on safety standards for kids’ summer fun, we just can’t always be there to enforce them. Particularly in the summer! Day camps, sleep away camps, time away at grandma’s place, all mean that other people, along with their own sense of appropriate risk, are deciding what is dangerous and what isn’t.

I was recently in charge of a 9-year old boy who I’d never met before. Let’s call him Sam. He’d come off the water with a sick tummy at the sailing regatta where I was the onshore parent. My role was just to be a kind, ginger-ale-offering adult until his mom could get there.

Within moments of getting out of his boat, Sam felt well enough to start playing with some other kids on nearby play structure. He and a few other boys were scaling the monkey bars and then diving headfirst down the slide. I didn’t love it, but I didn’t want to embarrass Sam by hovering. I turned away for a moment before realizing they’d grabbed a baby slide — maybe the size of a big sack of potatoes — and were riding it down the slide. I winced wondering if my young charge would still have all his teeth when he landed.

In my best, friendly-but-I-mean-business voice I said that only bodies could go down slides, not bodies on mini slides down slides. One of the other boys countered that his dad allowed this kind of thing. I said, “I’m only in charge of Sam, but I can tell you as a mom that nobody’s mother thinks that’s OK. I’m applying universal mom rules.�

Another father chimed in, “Yeah, my wife wouldn’t allow that either.� His two little ones sitting beside him on the park bench nodded in confirmation. Sam and his new friends looked at each other, shrugged, and carried on playing without the skull-cracking baby sled.

Ultimately, we hope that kids absorb a sense of what is safe so that they can keep themselves out of the ER too often. But it’s tricky when, even within families, there’s a lack of consensus. I am definitely the more cautious parent in my marriage; my husband preferring the old English slogan of: Better a broken arm than a broken spirit.

So how do we help kids figure it out? How do we encourage good choice-making skills into their puny prefrontal cortexes?

There’s nothing wrong with kids learning that there are different standards for different people. The conversation that small group of new friends had at the playground underscored for those kids that safety and risk are judgments, not rules. And how will they learn to make those judgments if we make all of them. If I’d told those boys they couldn’t go on the slide at all anymore and that they had to sit quietly on the park bench there would have been much more pushback (and the sense that universal mom rules suck).

I think the answer is in letting kids get as close to the edge of danger as we can possibly stand, so they can have a look at what might be on the other side. And yes, I suppose I can admit, that a broken arm isn’t too a price to pay for that piece of education. But not Sam’s arm — not on my watch.