Raising Kids With Character

Dirt-Bike Tag (and why every kid needs a bit of adventure in their life)

  • Thom Van Dycke, Author
  • Speaker, coach, writer

When I was 15 I busted up my knee pretty badly playing dirt-bike tag with my cousin, David. (Yes, the same David Richert, the race car driver, who blogs on this very website!) It was a bit of a freak accident. I had David’s younger sister on the back of the bike and I just slipped into a rut and tipped over. Unfortunately, my knee ended up bridging the gap and the motorbike came down on my knee.

Ouch.

You might wonder, “What kind of parents allow their kids to play motorbike tag? And wait a second… what even IS motorbike tag?” Allow me to explain the intricacies of the game; motorbike tag is when you play tag on your motorbike. (We weren’t genius in our naming of our games.) Of course, if you’re “it” when playing motorbike tag, you don’t actually get close enough to smack the other person, you just get within five feet of them. Then they are “it” and they give you a one-minute head start to get away and hide. It’s a lot of fun.

And to your question “What kind of parents allow their kids to play motorbike tag?” let me just say, awesome parents!

The truth is I don’t know if my parents fully knew that we were playing tag on our motorbikes. (Just like I’m pretty sure they didn’t know we played a game after harvest where we tried to be the last one to jump off a burning pile of straw!) We didn’t always announce our plans ahead of time. But I do know that they gave us freedom and allowed us to experience a bit of adventure, even a bit of danger.

It’s true, things could have turned out worse from time to time. In fact, I figure my life and others like mine, provide pretty profound evidence for the existence of a higher power! But I’m grateful for parents who made room for the adventurous spirit of their child!

Parents today tend to fall into two equally unhealthy categories. Either they hover over their kids every moment they are awake (and maybe when they’re asleep too), to make sure that they are still “safe” and breathing. (As if breathing was the only indication of safety.) Or, they give their children to much freedom without any boundaries.

My parents applied fair boundaries to dirt biking and we were in trouble if we violated them. If we wanted to go dirt biking we had to wear long pants, socks and shoes and a helmet. (I remember this one time my older brother skidded across the cement pad in front of our house on his bare belly and I never doubted the wear-a-shirt-while-dirt-biking rule again.) They also limited to where we could drive, and which of our friends could go with us.

I’m grateful that my parents understood that their job was not to protect us from all harm and potential danger, but to mitigate the risks on our many farm-life adventures. Kids need adventure to feel good about themselves. They need to push some boundaries and take risks, because that’s actually what they will be doing when they are our leaders in the future. Can you imagine a leader who has never been given the freedom to take a risk? That all starts with our kids!

We should never be afraid of the adventurous spirit in our children. We should encourage it! Draw it out of them and give them room to run, climb and ride. So today when your kid tells you she walked the playground monkey bars, congratulate her! When your kids ask to borrow the saw and hammer to build a treehouse, show them where the leftover lumber is as well! And when you find your kid on the shed roof, just make sure he hits the snowbank when he jumps (and have your camera ready to catch it if he doesn’t!)

Thom Van Dycke has worked with children and youth since 2001 and is a passionate advocate for healthy foster care. Together with his wife, since 2011, they have welcomed 30 foster children into their home. In 2017, Thom Van Dycke was trained as a Trust-Based Relational Intervention Practitioner.