This is where we spend most of our summer…
My parents built this pool when I was 21. While two of us hadn’t launched yet, three of us had.
I asked my dad why they were doing this now, when we were moving out?
He said, “So that you come back.”
My parents’ vision is now a reality. Every Sunday, we gather here.
My parents now have time to watch the kids swim, and they have banned certain games that are dangerous; they worry about injury. When I was growing up, this backyard had an above-ground pool with a covered deck, and unless you were sitting on the deck, you could not see what type of shenanigans we children were getting into.
We were unsupervised!
The most dangerous thing we did? A game called “The dunking game.”
You can imagine what this entailed.
Now, on Sundays, we take turns making dinner for twenty people, and the kids couldn’t love it more.
They swim, play basketball (cement and pool), backyard wiffle ball, make up dances on the lawn, cartwheels, and races, and there isn’t a screen in sight!
Sometimes we find ourselves there on a weekday, too.
This was the case on Wednesday of this week. My mom recently had back surgery, so I wanted to make sure another adult was there in case the kids needed something. Well, they needed something. We must have told them 84,000 times not to run around the pool.
We explain why…
There is tile and brick in some places, and when it gets wet, it’s slippery, and we don’t want them to slip and get injured. Do they still run? Of course they do! I had just announced it was time to get out of the pool. The moms were coming to pick them up, I was finishing a call, and I was going to go home with my kids, too.
My nephew announced, “One last cannonball!”
They all RAN to do their cannonballs, and on his way there, one of my nephews slipped and fell on the tile. His head hit the hot tub, and I came running. Thankfully, it wasn’t his head; it was his ear.
It was split open. I will spare you the gory details. My sister wasn’t there, so I jumped into mom mode, and my dad and I took him to the ER to have it repaired. My parents were beating themselves up; somehow, they thought they could have prevented this accident from happening.
I told them, “Active kids get hurt.” It reminded me that we can’t bubble wrap them. And now we have a modality to do that with technology. They can be “safe” in their rooms all summer. They won’t get broken bones or stitches. But the dangers online are far greater than a split-open ear. Online, they are exposed to pornography before they even know what sex is, grooming from pedophiles, active shooter video games, and Roblox, which has games where you can shoot up a school, simulate a Nazi concentration camp, and learn how to hide a dead body.
That’s just what they are exposed to. The other risk of experiencing a childhood online is what they miss out on in the real world. A rich connection with their village, lifetime memories, and experimenting with risk. Something kids, especially boys, need to do for their growth and maturity. Because the reality is that adolescent visits to the ER for mental health-related issues, including suicide, have nearly doubled in a decade from 2011-2020. There aren’t as many broken bones and stitches as there are self-harm and suicide attempts.
I asked my daughter if this incident caused her to pause and think about not running around the pool.
She shrugged her shoulders and said, “Maybe?”
Sounds about right.
We must continue to allow them to play and be kids, hope for the best, and be grateful for emergency rooms!
