8 ms·

> One little girl had 6 eggs in her basket by the end. That kid terrified me. I took our six year-old to an indoor climbing venue last year. She'd never done

> One little girl had 6 eggs in her basket by the end. That kid terrified me. I took our six year-old to an indoor climbing venue last year. She'd never done any kind of climbing before (although always seemed to be "climbing on" anything/everything at playgrounds and in kindergarten, particularly things that aren't really designed to be climbed. Had had a few interactions with gravity, including landing on her face at a playground, one of the reasons that prompted me to check out options for some proper climbing instruction for kids) We pitched up, she met the trainer, she's the youngest in the group and also the last experienced, they get kitted out and head out to warm up then start climbing, I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention... About 15 mins later another parent came over to me and asked "is that your daughter right at the top?" (about 16 meters/50 feet up, at the top of the wall) Me: "err ... yeah"

V__ 5y ago
Anyone who things we don't share common ancestors with apes should really visit a playground. I'm terrified at what my godchild and other children her age consider fun climbing heights, speeds... and drops.
- dan-robertson 5y ago
  When I was young and would visit my grandmother, the park there had some climbing structure made out of steel tubing with a big rope lattice inside. At the time it felt quite massive though trying to guess now it was perhaps 4.5-6m tall at the top. The ropes were pretty dense inside but it was this reverse-hourglass shape so it was pretty easy to go to the edge and not have a bunch of ropes underneath you. I’m amazed as an adult that that thing was allowed but it was pretty fun at the time and I’d guess not actually that dangerous.
  - V__ 5y ago
    Remembering back those were awesome. Can't image what our parents thought. I was curious and looked it up. In Germany climbing structures may have a "fall height" of up to 3 meters. They can be much higher, though, since the fall height is only counted to the next rope layer. Basically, the ropes will slow down your fall is safe enough.
  - feikname 5y ago
    I believge the name you're looking for is Jungle Gym (non-UK) or Climbing Frame (UK). In portuguese we call them trepa-trepa ("climb-climb") which I think is quite fitting.
    - frosted-flakes 5y ago
      Or simply a playground.
    - dan-robertson 5y ago
      I didn’t really want to give it a name because a climbing frame is something smaller than this thing in my mind.
- physicles 5y ago
  When I was 9 or 10 I went with some friends and their parents to a park that had a massive tree that was very easy to climb. Two of the boys and I hopped on and just kept going. Finally turned around either because we were shouted down by their parents or because one of us finally had some sense. Later on that day, a girl from their family was climbing on a low branch (maybe 2m off the ground), fell, and seriously messed up her ankle or knee. She was on crutches for a while. The boys and I must’ve been somewhere between 8 and 12 meters off the ground. In retrospect it’s one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done multi-pitch trad climbing.
dan-robertson 5y ago
Kids can have good strength-to-weight ratios and be flexible. Their problems are likely to be not being able to reach as far, being potentially a bit uncoordinated, and not being able to get much stronger with training (so eg struggling with things that require more strength or finger strength). And maybe not being great at being coached though adults can have that issue too. Overall, climbing is pretty kid friendly though a climbing parent probably helps a lot.
- treeman79 5y ago
  Put ‘em in gymnastics. Some of those girls id be afraid of.
  - mwint 5y ago
    From what I’ve seen, gymnastics tends to have some weird cultural… quirks… that aren’t as common in climbing.
    - relaxing 5y ago
      Go on…
      - deleted 5y ago
        [deleted]
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - wisemang 5y ago
    Or circus. Aerial silks, hoop etc
  - Etheryte 5y ago
    While gymnastics is a great all-around sport, it's sadly one of many which is not viable to do your whole life. Gymnastics is very hard on your body with tendon and ligament injuries being commonplace. Most gymnasts retire in their early twenties at the latest, often when faced with the medical reality of either giving up the sport or having joint pain for the rest of their life. While the sport is a marvel to see as a spectator, it comes at the cost of wearing out the body of the performer over a fairly short period of time.
jerezzprime 5y ago
I am a fan of the philosophy "don't tell kids what they can't do, because they don't know any better, and will surprise you". Let kids discover their limits instead of purposefully (or accidentally) imposing your own.
- cortesoft 5y ago
  I’ll try to remember that the next time my 3 year old insists he can drive my car
  - nullc 5y ago
    https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/5-year-old-driver-utah-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/5-year-old-driver-utah-trn...
  - postingposts 5y ago
    Can I ask why you wrote this comment? It’s a dig at the other person and it’s not terribly funny, just sarcastic. I didn’t think he meant to allow kids to do anything they want, just not to tell them what’s impossible before they have a shot at it. Do children normally drive cars where you are from?
    - cortesoft 5y ago
      Sure, I don’t mind you asking. I wrote it for a few reasons. One, to be funny… clearly the commenter was not thinking about something like driving when they made the comment, so I thought it was kinda funny to shift the perspective to think about something where it is clearly a bad idea to just let a kid try something they think they can do. Secondly, it was a bit from exasperation from comments I see about the ‘right’ ways to raise kids without thinking about/understanding the limitations that actual parents are under when trying to raise kids. I have two young kids (6 and 3), and in my experience, parenting is so much more about circumstances than parenting advice ever seems to acknowledge. For example, let’s take this advice. Whether I can just let my kids try something that I think they aren’t yet capable of doing is entirely dependent on the circumstances. Is it safe to let them try? Can I afford to spend the money it takes to let them try the thing? Do I have the time to clean up the mess that will happen if they fail? Is it legal to let them try? Will it prevent them from being able to do another thing that I think they are more likely to be able to do? Basically, my response to advice like this is usually an exasperated, “yeah, no shit I’d love to do that if I can, but so many things stop me from always doing it.” Maybe that is harsh, but it is the gut reaction to this sort of advice as a parent of young children. And I know I was guilty of this before I had kids. I had so many ideas about how I would raise my kids and do all of these things, but I learned quickly that you don’t have as much control as you would like to imagine as a parent. Before you have kids, you imagine you drive their growth like you drive a sports car, with precision and the ability to choose the exact path you take. In reality, it is more like sailing a giant sailboat in a storm, doing your best to keep the ship pointed in the generally correct direction without taking on too much water.
ourmandave 5y ago
The opposite of that was a city run family egg hunt at a park we took our 4-year-old daughter to. It was a giant field with most the eggs mostly scattered in the open. There were prizes if you found a certain number of eggs and 3 special metallic eggs worth bigger prizes like stuffed animals or one of those giant net stockings full of toys. In the end she found two eggs. But I remember some full grown dude bro waving a plastic bag and bragging how he'd scored like 30+ eggs. And I didn't see any family with him.
tourist2d 5y ago
zenithd 5y ago
Ashima Shiraishi was arguably the strongest female climber in the world when she was 13, Tommy Caldwell won a climbing competition against some world-class talent at 16, and it's not uncommon to see 10 year olds climb hard at gyms with good youth competition programs. Grades that used to be reserved for the best in the world (5.13+) are climbed nightly by kids at any number of gyms throughout the world. At my local gym, where a large number of former full time climbers get their fix, the competition high school kids are very often the strongest climbers in the room. It's really only higher commitment graded climbs (multi-day) and alpine that remain the realm of climbing where age 25+ are often better than age 15-25, and then more because the primary challenges are skill (dialed-in rope systems and logistics) and danger (judgement, reading terrain, route finding) rather than any particular piece of actual climbing. The speed record world seems something similar -- younger climbers are much stronger and much more brash; it's mostly much more experience with systems, logistics, and terrain that keeps older folks in the game. (This might also be why speed roped solo climbing remains a young person's game -- the systems are still in a period of innovation so there's less of an incumbent advantage. Or maybe older folks are just not interesting in playing.) In many ways, it's very similar to programming. I couldn't do the sort of epic hacking or programming comps I did as a kid (but of course old me is a much better person if what you want is a system you can trust or a system that solves a truly hard problem). > I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention... Responsive to another comment to the effect of "let the kids get scraped knees": Respectfully, as someone who has guided youth climbing trips, this is not an appropriate philosophy when introducing a child to rock climbing (indoors or outdoors). Climbing -- especially indoor climbing -- can fee lsafe but has unintuitive and EXTREME bifurcation points in its risk profile. Situations can change from extremely safe to almost certain death, and in many cases even most adults won't be able to perceive the difference. "let an uneducated kid climb a choss pile" can become something close to negligent homicide in the not unlikely event that they rip off a death block and kill a party below them. "Let a unsupervised kid climb 50 feet" is not dissimilar, because in case of a fall they are the death block for anyone walking below. Gravity is not something one can effectively learn about via gradient descent on the side a cliff.
- rcpt 5y ago
  > primary challenges are skill and danger Also money
jmcgough 5y ago
Children routinely out-climb adults because they're smaller and weigh less. Being younger is often an advantage.
noisy_boy 5y ago
For some reason I imagined your daughter to be Masha from Masha and the Bear[0]. [0]: https://youtube.com/c/MashaBearEN https://youtube.com/c/MashaBearEN

V__ 5y ago

Anyone who things we don't share common ancestors with apes should really visit a playground. I'm terrified at what my godchild and other children her age consider fun climbing heights, speeds... and drops.

dan-robertson 5y ago
When I was young and would visit my grandmother, the park there had some climbing structure made out of steel tubing with a big rope lattice inside. At the time it felt quite massive though trying to guess now it was perhaps 4.5-6m tall at the top. The ropes were pretty dense inside but it was this reverse-hourglass shape so it was pretty easy to go to the edge and not have a bunch of ropes underneath you. I’m amazed as an adult that that thing was allowed but it was pretty fun at the time and I’d guess not actually that dangerous.
- V__ 5y ago
  Remembering back those were awesome. Can't image what our parents thought. I was curious and looked it up. In Germany climbing structures may have a "fall height" of up to 3 meters. They can be much higher, though, since the fall height is only counted to the next rope layer. Basically, the ropes will slow down your fall is safe enough.
- feikname 5y ago
  I believge the name you're looking for is Jungle Gym (non-UK) or Climbing Frame (UK). In portuguese we call them trepa-trepa ("climb-climb") which I think is quite fitting.
  - frosted-flakes 5y ago
    Or simply a playground.
  - dan-robertson 5y ago
    I didn’t really want to give it a name because a climbing frame is something smaller than this thing in my mind.
physicles 5y ago
When I was 9 or 10 I went with some friends and their parents to a park that had a massive tree that was very easy to climb. Two of the boys and I hopped on and just kept going. Finally turned around either because we were shouted down by their parents or because one of us finally had some sense. Later on that day, a girl from their family was climbing on a low branch (maybe 2m off the ground), fell, and seriously messed up her ankle or knee. She was on crutches for a while. The boys and I must’ve been somewhere between 8 and 12 meters off the ground. In retrospect it’s one of the most dangerous things I’ve ever done, and I’ve done multi-pitch trad climbing.

dan-robertson 5y ago

Kids can have good strength-to-weight ratios and be flexible. Their problems are likely to be not being able to reach as far, being potentially a bit uncoordinated, and not being able to get much stronger with training (so eg struggling with things that require more strength or finger strength). And maybe not being great at being coached though adults can have that issue too. Overall, climbing is pretty kid friendly though a climbing parent probably helps a lot.

treeman79 5y ago
Put ‘em in gymnastics. Some of those girls id be afraid of.
- mwint 5y ago
  From what I’ve seen, gymnastics tends to have some weird cultural… quirks… that aren’t as common in climbing.
  - relaxing 5y ago
    Go on…
    - deleted 5y ago
      [deleted]
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- wisemang 5y ago
  Or circus. Aerial silks, hoop etc
- Etheryte 5y ago
  While gymnastics is a great all-around sport, it's sadly one of many which is not viable to do your whole life. Gymnastics is very hard on your body with tendon and ligament injuries being commonplace. Most gymnasts retire in their early twenties at the latest, often when faced with the medical reality of either giving up the sport or having joint pain for the rest of their life. While the sport is a marvel to see as a spectator, it comes at the cost of wearing out the body of the performer over a fairly short period of time.

jerezzprime 5y ago

I am a fan of the philosophy "don't tell kids what they can't do, because they don't know any better, and will surprise you". Let kids discover their limits instead of purposefully (or accidentally) imposing your own.

cortesoft 5y ago
I’ll try to remember that the next time my 3 year old insists he can drive my car
- nullc 5y ago
  https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/5-year-old-driver-utah-trnd/index.html https://www.cnn.com/2020/05/05/us/5-year-old-driver-utah-trn...
- postingposts 5y ago
  Can I ask why you wrote this comment? It’s a dig at the other person and it’s not terribly funny, just sarcastic. I didn’t think he meant to allow kids to do anything they want, just not to tell them what’s impossible before they have a shot at it. Do children normally drive cars where you are from?
  - cortesoft 5y ago
    Sure, I don’t mind you asking. I wrote it for a few reasons. One, to be funny… clearly the commenter was not thinking about something like driving when they made the comment, so I thought it was kinda funny to shift the perspective to think about something where it is clearly a bad idea to just let a kid try something they think they can do. Secondly, it was a bit from exasperation from comments I see about the ‘right’ ways to raise kids without thinking about/understanding the limitations that actual parents are under when trying to raise kids. I have two young kids (6 and 3), and in my experience, parenting is so much more about circumstances than parenting advice ever seems to acknowledge. For example, let’s take this advice. Whether I can just let my kids try something that I think they aren’t yet capable of doing is entirely dependent on the circumstances. Is it safe to let them try? Can I afford to spend the money it takes to let them try the thing? Do I have the time to clean up the mess that will happen if they fail? Is it legal to let them try? Will it prevent them from being able to do another thing that I think they are more likely to be able to do? Basically, my response to advice like this is usually an exasperated, “yeah, no shit I’d love to do that if I can, but so many things stop me from always doing it.” Maybe that is harsh, but it is the gut reaction to this sort of advice as a parent of young children. And I know I was guilty of this before I had kids. I had so many ideas about how I would raise my kids and do all of these things, but I learned quickly that you don’t have as much control as you would like to imagine as a parent. Before you have kids, you imagine you drive their growth like you drive a sports car, with precision and the ability to choose the exact path you take. In reality, it is more like sailing a giant sailboat in a storm, doing your best to keep the ship pointed in the generally correct direction without taking on too much water.

ourmandave 5y ago

The opposite of that was a city run family egg hunt at a park we took our 4-year-old daughter to. It was a giant field with most the eggs mostly scattered in the open. There were prizes if you found a certain number of eggs and 3 special metallic eggs worth bigger prizes like stuffed animals or one of those giant net stockings full of toys. In the end she found two eggs. But I remember some full grown dude bro waving a plastic bag and bragging how he'd scored like 30+ eggs. And I didn't see any family with him.

tourist2d 5y ago

zenithd 5y ago

Ashima Shiraishi was arguably the strongest female climber in the world when she was 13, Tommy Caldwell won a climbing competition against some world-class talent at 16, and it's not uncommon to see 10 year olds climb hard at gyms with good youth competition programs. Grades that used to be reserved for the best in the world (5.13+) are climbed nightly by kids at any number of gyms throughout the world. At my local gym, where a large number of former full time climbers get their fix, the competition high school kids are very often the strongest climbers in the room. It's really only higher commitment graded climbs (multi-day) and alpine that remain the realm of climbing where age 25+ are often better than age 15-25, and then more because the primary challenges are skill (dialed-in rope systems and logistics) and danger (judgement, reading terrain, route finding) rather than any particular piece of actual climbing. The speed record world seems something similar -- younger climbers are much stronger and much more brash; it's mostly much more experience with systems, logistics, and terrain that keeps older folks in the game. (This might also be why speed roped solo climbing remains a young person's game -- the systems are still in a period of innovation so there's less of an incumbent advantage. Or maybe older folks are just not interesting in playing.) In many ways, it's very similar to programming. I couldn't do the sort of epic hacking or programming comps I did as a kid (but of course old me is a much better person if what you want is a system you can trust or a system that solves a truly hard problem). > I did what any HN parent does: fired up my laptop to catch up with work and stopped paying attention... Responsive to another comment to the effect of "let the kids get scraped knees": Respectfully, as someone who has guided youth climbing trips, this is not an appropriate philosophy when introducing a child to rock climbing (indoors or outdoors). Climbing -- especially indoor climbing -- can fee lsafe but has unintuitive and EXTREME bifurcation points in its risk profile. Situations can change from extremely safe to almost certain death, and in many cases even most adults won't be able to perceive the difference. "let an uneducated kid climb a choss pile" can become something close to negligent homicide in the not unlikely event that they rip off a death block and kill a party below them. "Let a unsupervised kid climb 50 feet" is not dissimilar, because in case of a fall they are the death block for anyone walking below. Gravity is not something one can effectively learn about via gradient descent on the side a cliff.

rcpt 5y ago
> primary challenges are skill and danger Also money

jmcgough 5y ago

Children routinely out-climb adults because they're smaller and weigh less. Being younger is often an advantage.

noisy_boy 5y ago

For some reason I imagined your daughter to be Masha from Masha and the Bear[0]. [0]: https://youtube.com/c/MashaBearEN https://youtube.com/c/MashaBearEN