Jump

We begin today’s column with a question:  What is a chair?  Most people would probably say a chair is a piece of furniture on which to sit.  Good enough.  However, what would we then call a chair with a broken leg?  After all, few people would be willing to sit in a chair that they know is broken  Thus, if we define an object by its function, what does it become when it no longer serves that function?  Since we do not sit in broken chairs except for comedy purposes, is it appropriate to still call it a chair?

Let’s move this conversation, now, to the chair’s fat and lazy cousin, the couch.  I once  owned a very nice couch.  Like much modern furniture, this couch was large and squishy and unnecessarily beige.  According to our initial semantic reasoning—that an object is defined by its function—our couch stopped being a couch about a year ago. Now this object can only be described as my son’s springboard to concussion.  He hasn’t actually suffered a concussion yet, but we assume it’s only a matter of time.  Some families have cuss jars where they deposit change for every swear word; we have our ER jar where we put a quarter every time our son takes a flying leap.

And for most of his leaping career, we tried to stop it. 

“Stop it,” we would say. “Stop jumping off the couch.”

So he would stop.  He would stop for a few moments, and then, assuming we were already senile and had forgotten what had just happened before our eyes less than five minutes prior, he would slowly climb onto the couch again, tip-toe to its edge, balance upon the arm like a crazy trapeze artist, and then jump.  THUMP! 

“We said stop jumping off the couch!  Do you want us to put your tractors in time out?”

 “I am just jumping a little bit!” He would remark, all of his pre-school debating skills coming to the forefront.   “Just a little I can jump?”

“No.  That is a couch.  Couches are not for jumping.  Couches are for sitting.  We sit on couches.  We don’t jump off couches.  Sit.”

And he would sit.   For awhile.  Until we went senile again, and he would then jump again, and then we would have to put one of his seventy-five toy tractors in “time out” on top of a laundry cabinet that is beginning to look like a farm estate auction.

And this would stop the jumping.

For awhile.

Fortunately for my son but unfortunately for our furniture, a recent online article in The Atlantic has somewhat adjusted my attitude about couch jumping and his other pre-school parkour.  To summarize, the article basically suggests that modern children are becoming increasingly incapable of functioning on planet earth as individuals because of modern, misguided, helicopter-style parenting.  In essence, our well-meaning inclination toward keeping kids safe in what we see as an increasingly unsafe world has jeopardized one of the main functions of parenting in the first place:  namely, raising people capable of taking care of themselves.

One solution to this trend, the article contends, is allowing children to do things they believe are unsafe or at least physically feel unsafe, such as running very fast, hanging upside down, or even playing with fire under obvious adult supervision. Humans in general and children especially have a developmental need to take risk, to struggle, and to experience the new.  That is how they learn best and that it how they earn the confidence they will need to tackle life’s hardships at a time in the not-so-distant future when mommy and daddy won’t be around to fix things right.

 Therefore, now, in the relative anonymity of our own home, we occasionally allow our son to jump off the piece of furniture formerly known as our couch.  He jumps heartily into the THUD-dampering objects once known as our couch cushions.  We let him climb up and stand upon former chairs, and we don’t get too worked up when he sprints away from his sister down that long corridor thingy we once called a hallway.

Granted, we are all going to the hospital someday.  In fact, he’s just now recovering from his first black eye that he earned for trying to climb up the same tornado slide a little girl was curiously trying to slide down.  When a face meets a foot, the foot comes out on top.  Gravity always wins.  However, it is in his nature to climb, regardless of gravity, so we used this experience to try and teach him another life lesson:  a slide is still a slide when someone is at the top; it is only a climbing wall when no one else is around.

This should postpone our trip to the hospital.

For awhile.