This morning I dropped off three of my cousins at our local BART station in order for them to visit my sister via the next San Francisco bound train. My cousins, aged 15, 13, and 11 had never taken BART on their own and were decidedly not city kids. Despite the trip being fairly simple with the kids only needing to remember to take the San Francisco bound train and get off at the 24th Street station we were all nervous. What if they got off at the wrong stop? What if they got on the Dublin/Pleasanton bound train instead? How on earth could we think of sending these clueless kids on BART by themselves without a working cell phone? They couldn't even remember to charge the one they had, how could they remember to get on the San Francisco bound train to go to San Francisco?! Oh my freaking GOD whom I barely believe in! As I bought their tickets all the things that could go wrong ran through my head. I could just imagine my aunt's frantic calls about her missing children and it would be all my fault (well, all my sister's fault for insisting that I drop them off at BART in order for her to take them to a museum rather than her driving the 20 minutes across the bridge to Oakland to pick them up, but I digress).
I wasn't the only one who was nervous, the kids were nervous as well. MayMay the 15 year old worriedly kept repeating the name of the station while the ever prepared LinhLinh, aged 13 handed me a pencil and scrap of paper so that I could write every possible direction and phone number I could think of in case some unfathomable thing should happen. On my way back to the car I wondered how on earth, I, a person who had navigated the whole of Oakland, CA; one of the most dangerous cities in America by some accounts; via bus between the ages of 13 and 17, get to this paranoid point? My sister called me to ask if I had mentioned that the trains heading towards San Francisco are the Daly City or Millbrae bound trains. Daly City? Millbrae? Of course I didn't tell them that! They were going to get lost, I just knew it! Either that or some dangerous person of unknown motive would lead them astray somewhere and we'd never see them again because I didn't tell them they were supposed to get on the Daly City train because the don't always mention that a Daly City train is the same as a San Francisco train. How on earth did I think they could do this? What on earth were our parents thinking when they let me take BART and the bus when I did? How did J's parents let him fly across the country by himself at 8 with his mom only dropping him off at the curb and saying, "see you when you get back?" Is it really that possible that previous generations had more trust in their children? Could it be that all my paranoia, a feeling that I share with many many parents I know, is harmful? How can kids become resourceful if they are never really in a situation that requires them to be resourceful?
For my parents, they were forced to trust that I could handle myself at a fairly young age. I was the eldest child with younger siblings that I had to take care on my own from the time I was 7 years old. My parents had to work and could not afford babysitters so I was it with occasional supervision from my young aunts and uncles. These days, I can barely trust my 7 year old Evie to watch her little brother for 5 minutes let alone hours at a time. I don't trust her to be able to handle every negative situation that my creative mind throws at her. Am I giving her too little credit by not trusting her to take care of herself?
As I watched MayMay lead her younger sister and brother down the steps to catch their train, I couldn't help but remember the baby girl I babysat not so long ago. The one who needed my help for so long when I lived with her and her parents during my first year in college. I trusted her didn't I? Sure I did, because, of course they made it; safe and sound.