Madison Mom and Tween Doing Dangerous Things

Our favorite Madison Mom/Writer, Deborah Nies, and her daughter are working their way through the book – they’ve already knocked off seven topics!

Deb had this to say in her original article about the book:

Like many parents, I tend to be a bit overprotective of my child. I can hear my tween’s voice now in my ear, “Mom, you didn’t let me walk the five blocks home from school until the end of 3rd grade!”
Watch the news. Read a newspaper. The stories are enough to make me want to wrap my daughter in bubble wrap and raise her in isolation. As parents, we want to keep our children safe, and it seems intuitive that we should protect them. We pad the walls. We hover like helicopters, never letting them be alone to explore the world. And, then we have the audacity to pat ourselves on the back, because we are “good parents.”
Ironically, if we overprotect and over-insulate our children, they miss out on awesome learning opportunities. If denied life experiences, children won’t know how to respond when they are confronted with “dangerous” things.

Their recent tackling of Topic #31 “Go Underground” is especially harrowing:

…
Later reports from the giddy explorers, indicated that the storm drain narrowed into a small crawlspace, which forced them to backtrack to the larger opening. Upon their second exploration, they each wrote their names in chalk upon the walls to notify future comers that they’d been there. Following trek #3 & 4, the tunnel was deemed “dark and creepy,” but “so fun!”