When my brothers and I were growing up, our parents. Well, I can’t really say we were free-range children, but we have very progressive parents.
They moved here from Northern California, where they both graduated from Humboldt State University. They were on their way to Vail, Colorado, to go skiing. They stopped and went skiing one time at Alta, Utah, and said, “This is the place. We’re moving to Utah.” So they did. And that’s how I wound up being born here in Utah, and the same for my brothers.
They always encouraged us to find answers. If we were going to do something dangerous, they would make sure that we were safe enough, but they wouldn’t prevent us from going out and getting hurt. And we also did a lot of stuff we didn’t tell them about. There’s that too. But this is in the day where you didn’t wear helmets, skateboarding was just barely becoming popular. We had BMX bikes. We had our own dirt jumps. And yeah, we crashed on our faces sometimes, but we lived. That was the 70s and 80s and, of course, before.
And now I just wonder how many of these people growing up are so afraid of doing different things in their life.
And then maybe sometimes take it to the extreme and go way overboard with things that can really get them hurt because they never got the opportunity to bang themselves up when they were younger. Helicopter parents. Why didn’t I have to worry about that? No. And if we were going to do something dumb, they would say, “I suggest that, this.” Okay. And if we went and put our hand on the burner, they went, “Hmm, very interesting. Welcome to learning. Welcome to life. All right.”
We learned pretty quickly to start listening more closely to what they were asking us to do or stay away from. But at the same time, I really do value the fact that we got to be our own people and we got to make our own mistakes. We got to learn to clean up our own messes. That is something that is so valuable, especially when you get to be a little bit older and you have other people that you’re responsible for. Or you have a business, you have employees, you have other people counting on you. And that’s one of the most valuable things that I could ever have gotten from an upbringing where we were allowed to make mistakes, just because I can allow other people to make those too.
And help them in their learning as they learn through experience, not just by being told.
https://youtu.be/iiK0iohk4rY