The Safety Dance

I'm not going to let my son sail around the world by himself. At least, not for the foreseeable future and not because he has been pestering me to do so. He is, after all only thirteen. Now is the time when parental math becomes so very arbitrary. I know that when I was his age, there were a great many things that I felt completely ready for, but my parents would have disagreed. Leaving aside for a moment the example of circumnavigating the globe, let's examine a much more concrete example: crossing the street.
My family was taking a run/walk through the neighborhood yesterday when we came to an intersection where there was no marked crosswalk. It was an odd confluence of three streets, one continuing on uphill with another at a ninety degree angle while on the other side the third came angling in from behind a tall stand of trees. It is also the spot where, just about a year ago, our son had crossed on his bike just before a car came roaring down the hill and put his parents' collective heart in their collective throat. Now, a year later, my son wanted to know, as we crossed on foot, why he "always got busted" for crossing without a crosswalk. My wife made some accurate recollections of his near miss, and left hers with a comfortable "because we're grown ups." Mine was even more succinct, "because we don't want you to die."
More to the point, we don't want him to die knowing that we did not do everything humanly possible to keep him safe. Does that make us "helicopter parents?" I suspect it's a matter of degrees. While some would say that we are less focused, others I'm sure view us as Nervous Nellies, constantly interfering in our child's development. Of course he's going to fall down. Of course he's going to feel disappointment. I don't thinks that's grounds for neglect. But if my son announced that his burning ambition was to be the youngest person to scale Mount Everest, part of me would be full of pride, the rest of me would be stammering all the reasons why it would be too difficult crazy scary impossible. It's a tough balancing act: wanting your offspring to achieve their dreams and keeping them alive.
On the other hand, it's not that hard at all. I'm always going to feel most comfortable watching him from a safe distance. It's up to us to figure out what that safe distance is.