On parenting and living in fear

I’m often surprised by how different people try to parent their teenagers. They either seem astonishingly naive or unbearably controlling. Don’t they remember what it was like? Instagram and Snapchat or not, teenagers have always been teenagers. Maybe this is because my kids aren’t there yet and I can’t quite understand their position. Maybe it’s because these parents are often ten or fifteen years older than me and they really can’t remember their teen years as well. Maybe it’s because my teen years were more wild than theirs and I can’t be shocked.

But I was a bit shocked when I caught up with an old friend over the weekend and she vowed to never let her daughters do some of the things we did. Not to put too fine a point on it, but our parents didn’t exactly “let” us do those things either. How did that turn out? I expect my kids will do those sorts of things. I also expect I won’t like it very much either.

There’s been so much time and space devoted to discussing how communication and trust are so important with kids and teenagers. This is why we’re supposed to start talking to them about sex, drugs, racism, rape and all manner of difficult topics from a young age. We’re supposed to be building strong, trusting relationships so we don’t have to lock our kids in a room. And yet people still insist on monitoring their email and social media accounts which just sounds to me like picking up the extension and listening in on a phone conversation. “It’s not that I don’t trust my children,” I can hear people saying. “It’s the other people out there I don’t trust.”

And I get that. Everyone simply wants to protect their children. “If only it were a different time,” people say. For sure, they would give their children more freedom and independence except you know how thing are now. But can we take a moment to consider that now is Canada in the 21 century. We are raising a our children in a country that hasn’t drafted citizens into the army since World War or seen a battle on our own soil since 1812. It’s a country in which tolerance and respect are highly esteemed values and possession of hand guns is both rare and illegal. It has never been easier to call for help or even to just drop your parents a message to let them know you’re all right. I don’t imagine there ever really was a safer or better time anywhere.

Still, people are afraid and I understand that. But I don’t want to parent out of fear. I don’t want to do anything out of fear.

So this horrible local news makes me really fucking angry.

I am a 35-year-old woman who lives in that area. I have been known to walk home by myself from a local bar or friend’s home after midnight. I LIKE walking around my city at night. By and large, I feel safe walking around my city at night. I won’t jog through High Park or cut through alleyways. I keep my head up and my Spidey sense turned up high. But I still do it.

And I’m not going to stop. There’s no way in hell that I’m going to be forced to change the way that I live in my own city just because I’m a woman. I refuse to live in fear.

But then I have these two daughters (and one son) and I get it. I really do. The potential danger that’s out there lurking in every shadow in manifold. It makes you want to lock them in their bedrooms or to embed a GPS chip under their skin; whatever it takes.

We lost a young member of my extended family in a boating accident last week. The newspaper reported on an otherwise healthy child dying from complications related to strep throat. People die in car crashes every day. There’s never any guarantee of safety, is there?

There are always reasons to be afraid, for ourselves and for our children. But I don’t want any of us to feel trapped by fear. The only people who should be locked away are the rapists.