Children Need To Take Risks, and Parents Need to Let Them

By LYNN MESSINA

I’m haunted by a 3-year-old French girl in a buttercup-yellow dress. She’s a vague remnant from an article I read sometime in the last two to three years about the supreme competence of French children. While her mother chatted with a reporter in the living room, the girl very ably made cupcakes in the kitchen. In the years since I read the article, she periodically appears in my life as a rebuke against too much caution.

She shows up now as my 6-year-old son asks to light the Hanukkah candles. We keep the menorah on the fireplace mantel, well above Emmett’s grasp, and it’s never occurred to him to ask before. For years, he’s stood happily next to his father while I mangle the prayer, waiting to sing “O Hanukkah,” which his dad composed to the tune of “O Canada” because that’s our family’s tradition. But this year Hanukkah fell on Thanksgiving, and Emmett stood silently by while a cousin his exact same age lit the menorah. He’s been pleading for his turn ever since.

I understand the attraction: not just the primal pull of fire but the participatory tug. But I also know fire. My father owns a lab that tests the flammability of fabric, and I spent my summers in college holding a flame under hundreds of pairs of children’s pajamas and recording the damage. Most fabrics smoldered and winked out, but every so often one would flare into a devouring blaze in the blink of an eye.

Still, I think, French children probably light their own barbecues and grill their own steaks while whipping up Hollandaise.

The French girl also appeared over Passover, when Emmett wanted to help peel potatoes. My instinct was to say no, the peeler’s too sharp. But he swore he had used one at school and, well, there are all those French children making all those cupcakes. I said yes, and he promptly cut himself on the blade, slicing a deep gash in his thumb that brought a halt to all potato-peeling enterprises for 25 minutes and left him dry-hiccupping on the couch for half the afternoon.

The arguments against his lighting the menorah run along the same lines as the potato peeler (he’s going to get hurt, it will derail the process) but so does the argument for. And so, acceding gracefully, I light the Shamash and hand it to Emmett, who holds it with one hand, despite my request that he use two. With quiet deliberation, he lights the first candle, then the next. Almost immediately, his little brother, who will be 3 in January, asks to light one, his tone growing increasingly agitated as his will is thwarted, and in a flash it comes back to me: how my brothers and I used to argue over who lit which candles each night. Grappling over fire is an intrinsic part of my Hanukkah tradition, and every night my mom calmly negotiated a seemingly fair settlement.

And then, because all my memories of my mom are tied together by one endless thread, I suddenly recall what she said when, at 16, I asked if I could take the train from our Long Island suburb into New York City on a Friday night with my friends. She paused, then asked herself two questions out loud: Am I ready for this? Will I ever be ready for this? Both questions elicited a no, and yet somehow she said yes.

The calculus of this answer confounded me as a teenager, but as I watch Emmett hold the flickering candle, it makes perfect sense. If her comfort level was a function of time, then the problem was mine and I would wait. But if it was a general anxiety about her child’s safety that would never quite go away, then the problem was hers and I wouldn’t.

My mom died 15 years ago, long before I knew I wanted kids, and it occurs to me as Emmett lights the last candle that if I must have a voice in my head, far better that it be hers than a vague French girl in a buttercup-yellow dress. The parenting road ahead is long and riddled with land mines, and I’m keenly aware that Hanukkah candles and potato peelers are quaint concerns — luxuries, really, in the universe of things to worry about. All too soon my sons will be asking to do things with actual risks that will have to assessed, and as I wonder if I’ll have the strength to say yes to any of them, I find myself thinking, Please, Mom, haunt me more.