I recently read this headline in my Facebook feed: Mom ‘shamed’ for letting 7-year-old daughter ride on motorcycle. It was posted in a closed motorcycling group, so you can imagine it wasn’t particularly well received, including by me.
In order to keep the discussion where it should be conceptually, I have to preface it with this – I don’t agree with that parent’s choice to put her child on the back of the motorcycle without full gear. With that out of the way, I want to start with this premise: Shaming anyone for their parenting choices is bullshit. If it’s legal and not harming the child, you have no right to say anything. We make choices for ourselves and our children by weighing what we determine is an acceptable level of risk, and do what we can to mitigate the risk. Your unacceptable level of risk is just a day in my life.
Annie, my daughter, has grown up around motorcycles. Some of her earliest memories with me are working on bikes. She’s watched me at the track. She started asking when she could get a motorcycle at age 3. She got her first one at age 5. She’s been riding since then.
She’s also a better-educated motorcycle r,ider than many adults I know. She’s taken the MSF Dirtbike School twice. She knows the importance of ATGATT. (For those of you non-riders, that would be All The Gear, All The Time.) She’s even reminded me of it occasionally.
She’s also been riding pillion on my motorcycle since she was about nine. She has a complete set of fitted street gear. She loves it.
We’re already planning her eventual motorcycle license and move to the street. I’ve agreed to buy her first bike – as long as I get to pick it. Before that, she’s considering the possibilities of road racing, which I’ll also allow… and participate in.
Now she’s in her early teens, motorcycling is one thing I’m relatively certain we’ll always have in common. It creates a channel for us to be together and communicate – probably the single most important part of the parent/child relationship.
You may disagree with these choices. I respect that you disagree. I’m sure if I examined your parenting choices, I could find something with which I disagree. We both need to respect this: how we choose to parent our children is an individual choice, and there’s nothing shameful in them.