Letting Go!

There is that about overprotective parents, they take their obligations to their children seriously, very seriously indeed. They hover protectively over their children, anxious to shield them from danger. They worry lest, despite all their attempts to protect their children from the unforeseen, disaster may yet strike, for they cannot be everywhere at once, and they well understand that there will come a time when their children will strike out on their own.

Parents can hope that they have adequately instilled a sense of responsibility in their children, enabling them to enter the world of adulthood as fully functioning, knowledgeable and equipped adults. But this is a timed investment. Entering the world of adulthood is a natural event, following sequentially on a drawn-out period of maturation from child to youth to early adulthood.

As their children trusted them to expose them to learning situations, and to provide for them and to give them the emotional support they required when they needed it, the parents must learn to let go, to trust that their years of sacrifice and love and concern would result in a new and aspirational search for the meaning of life for their offspring.

That success and satisfaction and happiness would accrue to their children. Which is all that parents really want for their beloved children.

It is the parents' responsibility to prepare their children for the world outside the home. To socialize them and imbue them with a sense of self-worth, to encourage them to pursue interests that beckon, and to caution them when their pursuits are seen by their parents to be potentially inimical to their health and well-being. This is the natural order of things, from generation to generation.

So, what to make of a child who insists, at the age of thirteen, that she is prepared and determined to face a challenge that would daunt an adult, even one who was well instructed and intellectually mature and physically capable? Children often are seized with an impulse that propels them toward an objective that their parents doubt.

This is when parents take charge and impel the child through the medium of intelligent appraisal, and persuasive reason, to accept that further preparation is required, and most certainly chronological maturation before thinking of embarking on a pursuit so fraught with potential for life-altering or -ending danger.

Yet the parents of Laura Dekker, a Dutch girl who insists she is capable and intent on launching herself solo on a sailing trip around the world, agree with her and support her ambition. She wants to navigate her sailboat, Guppy, on a worldwide voyage, setting out on September 1st, when she will turn 14. Insisting that her parents acknowledge that it is her dream to set out on this voyage.

And it is her intention to 'break a record' for youth in this enterprise.

Evidently a 17-year-old boy has accomplished just such a journey, embarking on a 13-month voyage around the world. This young girl appears to harbour aspirations of besting his adventure and his youth, to acquire her own reputation as a 'first' on all counts. Celebrity appears to appeal to her. Anything he can do, she can do better. She aspires to commit to a two-year voyage on her own.

Her father insists the girl is an experienced sailor. "According to the government, all people must apparently be put in the same box. They seem not able to understand that everyone is different", he explained disdainful of the concerns of Dutch MPs and child protection officials, concerned about the welfare of a child her own father appears fairly relaxed about.
This is nothing if not an instance of mind-boggling lack of concern for the well being of a child.

The story reeks of parental neglect in failing to guide a vulnerable teen toward reasonable accommodation, to set aside for the time being, plans that have the potential of ending her ambitions at a very early age indeed.