Keeping an eye on skater girl and child

Kirk Ericson | Feb 23, 20230

It’s hard to watch humans without judging, but it can be a liberating activity. Be the observer. Drop your ego, shut up, turn off the sensors that require you to criticize. Let a scene play out in front of you. Watch. Listen.

Here’s a scene I witnessed some summers ago: A woman who looked to be in her mid-20s was standing at the entrance to a crosswalk on a downtown street around dusk. I was in my car, stopped at a red light, when the woman caught my attention to my right.

The woman bore a full backpack, she had a beverage in one hand, and one foot was on a skateboard while her other foot was awkwardly trying to propel the board as she entered the crosswalk. On her left hip, she balanced a child, maybe 2 years old.

The woman was trying to work out how to balance her load. She repositioned her foot on the board, moved the child higher onto her hip and bent her standing knee more. Her position looked wobbly.

My parental eyes widened, and I feared she’d fall and the child would be hurt. I imagined the beverage, perhaps coffee, spilling and burning the child. I imagined calamity.

I watched. The woman figured out the balance and a quarter of the way across the intersection, her pushing foot went onto the board and she began to roll easily toward the curb. In an instant, she went from ungainly to gainly, like a kite that had just caught the wind. The air puffed up the bangs of the child’s hair, and the child glowed.

She rolled up the curb cut and stepped off the board effortlessly. The light turned green, and I turned left, driving slowly to the next intersection so I could keep an eye on the pair. She alternately pushed the skateboard with her feet along the sidewalk and rode it to a bus stop, where she stepped off the board, dropped her backpack, and put down the child and her beverage.

The child climbed on the skateboard and scooted along the sidewalk while the woman stretched and ensured the child didn’t go astray.

The light turned green and I went.

My initial take was this woman was endangering a child. I didn’t give her credit that she could do what she was trying to do. And here’s the thing about such criticism: It’s often hypocritical.

I was sometimes accused of putting my own two — now grown — children at risk, but I knew it was behavior I could do safely and that my boys would enjoy. But to some, it looked dangerous, just as the woman on a skateboard with a child looked dangerous to me.

I stewed when people accused me of being reckless with my children, and that woman on the skateboard likely heard similar sermons. (For the record, just one of my boys ever had an emergency room visit, and that happened with a babysitter.)

I can hear the tut tuts.

There are obvious cases where a parent puts a child at unnecessary risk. Those cases do require judgment and action. But we’re not talking about that here. We’re talking about instances of parental acts – a woman holding a baby while riding a skateboard, a father holding a son upside down by one leg – that exist in a gray zone, where there’s a likely potential for fun and a less-likely potential for harm.

Instead of seeing a woman imperil a child, I could have instead seen a woman showing a child a wonderful time on a summer evening.