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I was doing a book reading at a local bookshop in a nearby community (you can find my book, here, by the way). It was a midday event, and so the audience trended strongly towards older people, retirees. After the reading, I got a lot of questions about my kids and if or how I am pushing them into climbing.
It’s a fair concern, but maybe a criticism that would be incisive if it were framed in a slightly more nuanced way.
I honestly can’t think of a time that I asked the boys if they wanted to go climbing, they said, “No,” and I drug them along anyway. Yes, there are times they’ve said, “No.” But then we don’t go. I think it would be both not fun and more dangerous if I were climbing with people who didn’t want to be there.
But they also haven’t said, “No,” very often, maybe a couple of times over the near decade, now, that they’ve been roping up. That reality, though, is where I think the real criticism might sit, not in some forceful podding on my part.
When I think about my kids exposure to climbing, it strikes me that they just have always had it around them. Our house has pictures from my expeditions. There’s always been ice tools and other climbing gear in the home gym. Heck, I’ve had a home climbing wall in each of the three houses we’ve lived in since their birth. I’ve had climbing friends over, and we’ve talked about climbing. I’ve had climbing documentaries on the TV. One of the first movies the boys ever explicitly asked to watch was “Meru.” They were too young to ask for it by name, but they called it “The Steep One.” That’s telling in several ways, not the least of which being they distiguished that climbing movies from other climbing movies due to the steepness of the mountain which mean they had enough exposure to climbing movies that they needed to distinguish that movie from the others.
In other words, climbing was all around them. In some ways, that’s a lot more insideous than brow-beating my kids into going on climbing outing that they really don’t want to go on. It was normalized for them, and whatever is our version of normal is what we all tend to gravitate towards.
Would I care if they didn’t climb? No, I would not. I’m thrilled that they are finding friends in their orchestra classes (one plays the violin and the other plays the chello). I love they they are on the school’s robotics team (yes, there are competitive robotics tournaments, now). I want them flexing their brains and their artistic impulses. I play guitar and I was a very good student who went on to get a post-graduate degree. I think some level of fluency in the arts and sciences lead to well rounded people.
But maybe the kids never stood a chance when it came to climbing. Maybe the normalization of risk taking is both good and bad… and who’s to say if the goods outweigh the bads. If I loved pastery baking and had cook books all over my house, would they have gotten into baking? If I asked them if they wanted to try a new pastry recipe this weekend, would they generally say, “Yes,” to get more of that quality time with Dad?
In some ways, what I’m thinking about is probably somethlink akin to tautological: we can’t escape the physical and psycological evidence of who we are and our kids, living in close proximity to us, won’t escape that evidence, either. So, I don’t think I’m free of any moral responsibility for making choices about what my kids are exposed to or not, but I also am not sure I would ever be able to fully escape my identity. So, the question becomes, what role do I play in actively shaping that identity and choosing how I present myself to my kids?
I bring this up because my kids wanted to climb a peak of 20,500 feet (about 6250 meters) in the Himalaya. And this video is how we prepared. Yes, we chose a comparatively safe peak with little technical risk, and limited objective risks (like avalanches or rock fall or such). But high altitude is still a risk, even if there is nothing above the route to fall on you. Weather is still a risk, even with modern forecasts.
Behind the specific points of this video - how we trained our fitness to take on this objective - is a larger question: where is the role of a parent in shaping a kid’s dreams and goals, both in terms of encouragement and discourgement? It’s not an easy question.
Clearly, this fell within my and my wife’s risk tolerances. But not every goal the boys could conjure up would.