by Tara Shafer posted in Parenting

Last week the weather in my tiny Northeast village mercifully turned sunny and hot. Spirits lifted. Spring fever immediately set in. I was procrastinating and scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed. There, I came upon a post by my friend Meredith calling on local moms to help her enforce her son?s helmet wearing when riding a bicycle.
Meredith wrote:
?If you see my beloved son Ryan riding his long board or bike riding without a helmet please feel free to yell, ?Your Mom said you have to wear a helmet!' or PM me. Perhaps the nagging of 100 parents will be irritating enough to break him. I like his head intact and I don?t want to spoon feed him into adulthood because he?s too lazy to wear his (new, $80) helmet. Sorry (not sorry) Ryan but you left me no choice. #itliterallytakesavillage? This post struck me as courageous on a couple of levels. For one, she was recognizing that she, like all of us, needed help and was asking for it. Parents are vulnerable. It is the worst.
Meredith was recognizing that tweens and teens reach for freedoms the boundaries of which can be both squirrely and unforgiving. This is normal behavior. As parents, we want our children to make mistakes and to learn from them ? it is our greatest hope that mistakes made are not irredeemable.
With the sudden onset of the spring, I noticed immediately throngs of tweens riding bikes. It is one of the most wonderful things about small town life ? relative autonomy and innocen...