August 01, 2025

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Hilarious, when parents discover parenting

On Fox's Big Weekend Show, they had a brief and funny report on FAFO -- a parenting technique called "F Around and Find Out." Or, as my generation called it, "Natural Consequences."

"We warn them what will happen, but don't prevent them from stupid mistakes, and also don't bail them out when it happens as we predicted."

But let's be real. Sometimes the consequences can be so dire that if you love your children at all, you will move heaven and earth to prevent them from doing the dumb thing they have in mind.

I saw this just as I was looking at family pictures from OneDrive, which periodically reminds me of pictures uploaded on this date in the past. The picture that seemed applicable was my then-twenty-year-old brother-in-law, while serving his LDS mission, dangling from a bridge high above a raging torrent, hooking onto the railing only by his feet.

If the wood of the railing hadn't held, or his feet had slipped, this would be a photo of a tragic ending to a wonderful life. I know now, forty years later, just how much he, and we, would have missed, if he had died then from this playful and stupid behavior. We adore his children. We depend on him and his mad skills at pretty much everything. We love him and his sense of humor and perfect dependability.

This was the brother-in-law who used to do roof work, including putting up our Christmas lights every winter. But after he had a few children, he realized what almost all of us realize: How can I risk my life when these people I love depend on me?

Of course, I had those feelings even before I had children or a wife or ... well, anybody depending on me. At church today, our speaker told the story of when he and his family climbed Mr. Timpanogos in Utah County, Utah. They left in the early afternoon -- which even I knew was way too late in the day, because the sun sets on the other side of the mountain, so when you descend on switchback trails with steep dropoffs, you end up doing it in the dark, risking your life long before you can get down to level ground.

I spoke to him after the meeting and said, "You know, the point of your sermon was kind of lost on me, because I have never had the least interest in climbing any mountain at any time of day." He laughed, and my wife, who was nearby, pointed out that she had climbed Mr. Timpanogos twice to the peak, and two other times to the glacial lake partway up.

But my wife knew that I was an acrophobe before we got married. Years before, the closest I had come to such idiocy was letting a girlfriend goad me into going skiing. I almost wet myself riding up on the ski lift -- one of the worst quarter-hours of my life -- and even using the snowplow method all the way down, I resolved on the way down that skiing was not worth developing as a skill, not for me. I later heard of Sonny Bono's tragic death while skiing and thought, He might have been a congressman, but he was stupider than me. Because I would never go fast enough downhill on skis to die from crashing into a tree.

I don't do roller coasters. The only one I ever rode on was a kiddie coaster which my parents made me ride on because my six-year-old little brother wanted to ride and I had to accompany him. He screamed and cried through the whole things. Because it was my job as a nine-year-old to reassure him, I did not scream and cry -- but I wanted to. Since then, he actually married the girl who had talked me into skiing, and he's a pretty good skier. But I figured that the one baby roller coaster was enough for a lifetime.

Acrophobia isn't a disorder. It's wisdom.

Do you know what the natural consequences are of not standing or walking along the edges of steep dropoffs? You get teased or have to listen to rhapsodic lectures on what I'm missing out on. I remain perfectly impervious because my own fear trumps their taunting any day of the week.

My resistance to being "dared" to do something is one hundred percent. When I went to Brazil on my own LDS mission, the other missionaries loved to set the new guys up for teasing by getting them to say something that has a gross or obscene meaning in Portuguese. "I forget what they call it in English, the day you get your wages, your salary." The goal was to get me to say "Payday." Which is a homophone for the Portuguese "Peidei," which means "I farted." Yeah, sure, harmless fun, right? But such pranks never work on me, because I simply do. Not. Play.

Am I a spoilsport? Yep. Sure. Do I miss out on a lot of thrilling experiences? Some people think so. But there's enough terror in real life -- why would I do some activity whose whole point is to get adrenaline pumping through my bloodstream? Why should I fool my body into thinking that it's going to die?

Especially when I place a high priority on convincing my body to stay alive!

I'll never bungee-jump, para-sail, sky-dive, or simply dive into a pool. With my fading ability to maintain physical balance, I use a cane to prevent falling. Because it happens to be true that if I fall, I can't get up. When you've had to call EMTs to get you up off the floor of your own family room, you know that even walking around can be a risky behavior.