Riding home from dropping A- off at school this morning, G- and I were biking along quite happily when he suddenly and without warning stopped in the middle of the sidewalk. I was riding along closely and smacked into the back of his bike, to my horror. His bike was pushed out from under him and he flipped backwards over his bike, ending up tangled in the bike and quite shocked by the sudden turn of events. Fortunately, I was close enough that I could just swoop him up and hug him while he burst into tears and worked through the shock and fear. Amazingly, he was almost completely unhurt, just a small scratch on his cheek.
The entire incident impressed me because not only was he remarkably resilient – within an hour all was forgotten, and two hours later I touched his cheek and he said it didn’t even hurt at all – but he really spent a lot of time today thinking about what happened. After the crash, I told him that “being a biker meant that you sometimes crashed” and that I had many spectacular crashes in my time. For the remainder of the day, he’d sporadically ask “tell me about when you crashed your bike, Daddy”, and hang on every word.
Which leads to an observation: the wee folk are thinking and processing every experience, every scene, every word. We forget that all too easily, but children really are little sponges and it’s the wise parent that not only remembers that, but tries to encourage it. We, as adults, process things and push them aside fairly quickly, but perhaps the younger you are, the less likely you are to use that method of dealing with the world.
And, of course, the best part of this lesson is that G- is unhurt.
I hope somebody also learned not to tailgate other bikers, and hope you were both wearing bike helmets …
Personally all the good you are doing for your children by at least taking them on a bike ride with you far outways any little accident that may happen on the way. I for one must have drove my parents to near insanity. By the age of 8 I had three broken arms, not a typo one of them, my right, was broken twice, and a gashed foot twice. Once when helping my sister down a ledge I jumped first and landed on the sand but there was a broken beer bottle under the sand where my foot landed and secondly when walking in the mud at a local creek and a similar event took place. The memories have neither made me more carefull or worse for wear. Drama seems to be over exagerated in todays events. Yes children do look at things from a different perspective and luckily for them. with not too many earlier tragic events to add to new ones, which in us adults probably make simple problems seem so large, that accumilative effect. So keep riding with your kids and dust them down if they have a spill but really I see no big problems here. Plus they are sponges and give them all the knowledge they can take everyday. Smarter kids = smarter adults.