Risk & Reward: Climbing at Frenchman Coulee

Have you heard someone say “high risk, high reward?” True in the stock market, for example, but how about in activities that involve our kids?

I appreciate Love and Logic’s spin on how to approach risk with kids.  Let them fail as much as possible when they are young, when the cost of failure is low.  Of course, we are going to immediately protect our children if they run out into a busy street, but what about when they are riding their bike without hands for the first time?  Sometimes you just have to let them take the risk of failure if it doesn’t cost them their lives.

When it come to sports like rock climbing, one better know the technique!  Rock climbing is actually one of the safests sports out there, unless of course one does not know how to practice redundancy in safety and a number of other skills.  But how about letting the kids boulder around…even to some high rocks?  The video footage shows my kids up on a cliff, pretty close to the edge.  After years of training them to be safe but to take risks, I was confident that they were mature enough to make wise choices.  Still, I had my eye on them the entire time, coaching them when needed.  I yelled at one point, “that doesn’t look safe to me.” And my daughter backed away from what she was attempting.

Letting kids “run free” as much as possible is such an important element of discovery and growing up.  While accidents sometimes happen, I hope that my kids and yours too experience the childhood adventures that are theirs to uncover.  The whole family will receive a high reward!

“Life is either a daring adventure or nothing at all.”

― Helen Keller, The Open Door

“If you dare nothing,

then when the day is over,

nothing is all you will have gained.”

― Neil Gaiman, The Graveyard Book

“But he’d learned long ago that a life lived without risks pretty much wasn’t worth living. Life rewarded courage, even when that first step was taken neck-deep in fear.”

― Tamera Alexander, Within My Heart