It's a Dangerous Life

ADad
Mon, 20 Feb 2012 15:00:48 +0000

We have a son like that.

We’ve done two things: 1. put things off (like getting the pilot’s license that friends got in high school and he dearly wanted, and eventually got at age 23). 2. Encourage and support knowledgeable risk taking, as opposed to impulsiveness or “winging it”.

He learned a lot by being an EMT. Important parts of EMT training are making sure that the scene is safe (situational awareness) and an insistence on following procedures. In college, he held positions of responsibility in his school’s rescue squad, and he saw first-hand how problems occurred when people did not follow procedures.

He also learned a lot in a “human factors” college course, where they studied how human error led to airplane crashes that were readily avoidable. He talked to us a lot about this course, and we, perhaps naively, thought that those discussions were constructive.