Dingus Milktoast wrote:Allow me to explain - I have daughters; several. No sons. I firmly believe that teenage girls need role models just as do teenage boys. But what sorts of role models are there?
I have one daughter who's still a teenager. I don't suppose I've always been consistent about this topic--when she was little I bought (!) and read her Merrick Johhnson's book about climbing Denali at 12, and I didn't make any negative comments. My girl has more recently become passionate about mountains and has, by putting in tons of hours on her own initiative, made herself a pretty good rock climber. As a trad leader she has a bit of that teenage faith in immortality we can all remember, and this has caused me a few anxious moments. And I'm sure if something bad were to happen, others would blame me and I would blame myself for giving her a long leash.
The leash isn't unlimited, though. Recently she declared an interest in joining a rather ill-conceived expedition to Mt. St. Elias. I was pretty unsupportive. It seemed to me that, to her, St. Elias was just a shiny bauble, just as it is to those SPers who post lame mountain pages about it every so often. My feeling is that if you are going to take a 3 or 5% risk of death, ok, but it had better be some deeply held, long-term, mature goal from within yourself. I'm not sure teenagers can reliably determine if something really matters that much to them. Anyway, if it does matter that much, pushing through a few headwinds from nervous parents can be part of the challenge. We don't always have to "support" them, and it may not be good if we do.
One thing I've tried to instill--and this is not going to be a sentiment shared by all on this site--is that in general, climbing is not a source of "accomplishments" in life. Mountains are wonderful and have much to give us, but if you are a talented person and you channel all those talents to climbing till you die doing it, you may be wasting yourself.
A book I recently gave her, which she devoured, was Gabrielle Walker's "Snowball Earth." The scientific saga it chronicles was achieved mostly by people who were incredibly hard and tough and adventurous outdoorsmen (Mawson, Hoffman, etc), but ultimately the adventure and the physical challenge were a side salad. The main course was not self-discovery, but true advancement of human knowledge.