4 Unspoken Questions Every Parent Who Bought Their Kid an E-Scooter Needs to Ask
I was reaching for a carton of oat milk at the corner market last Saturday when my neighbor Lila grabbed my arm, her thumb still hovering over a text she’d just gotten from another mom. “Did you know Jax’s e-scooter goes 19 miles an hour?” she said. “He’s been riding it to school all week and I never checked.” I nodded, because I’d been in her exact spot six months earlier, when I found out my 13-year-old son Milo had disabled the speed limiter on the e-scooter I’d bought him for his birthday.
I’d done all the obvious, recommended things first. I read our city’s rules for kid e-scooters, bought an ANSI-certified helmet, padded knee and elbow guards, added a loud bell and a detachable headlight. I made Milo watch the 10-minute safety video the local park district posted online. I quizzed him on road rules. I thought I was done. A month later, I got a call from the middle school office: a crossing guard had seen him cutting between cars on Main Street, flying down the steep hill by the library to get to school on time. I was ready to storm in and yell about breaking rules, but I took a breath first, and when I picked him up I just asked him why he’d done it. That’s when all the stuff no one tells you about buying your kid an e-scooter started coming out.
The first question I never thought to ask was what he and his friends had changed about the scooter. Most kid-focused e-scooters come with a factory-set 15 mph speed limit, but Milo told me it takes two minutes to find a YouTube tutorial showing how to remove it. Almost every kid he knows with an e-scooter has done it, he said, because going slower than everyone else at the park makes you the butt of jokes. I’d had no idea. I pulled up the app connected to his scooter that night, and sure enough, he’d turned the limit up to 19 mph a week after I gave it to him. Instead of accusing him of being reckless (which just makes kids shut down), I started asking other parents I know, and almost all of them had the same story. Now I tell people to skip the yes/no question “Did you mess with the speed setting” and ask something open-ended instead: “What’s the most common trick kids do with their scooters that parents don’t know about?” It puts them at ease, and you’ll almost always get a straight answer. Most scooter apps let you lock the speed setting with a parent-only passcode, too. I did that that night, and we compromised: 15 mph on neighborhood and main streets, 18 mph only on the closed paved path at the park when I’m there with him. It’s worked so far.
The second question I didn’t ask was what route he actually takes when he rides. I’d walked the “approved” route to school with him before he started riding, the one that uses the protected bike path and avoids busy Main Street. What I didn’t know is that the path has a broken pedestrian crossing right by the library, and detouring around it adds eight minutes to his trip. Milo started taking Main Street because he hated getting detention for being late to first period. I never thought to check his actual route after the first week. Once I found out, I drove the route he’d been taking alone on a Sunday morning just to see what he was dealing with, then we made a small change: he leaves 10 minutes earlier every day, so the bike path doesn’t make him late, and I emailed the city to report the broken crossing. That took five minutes total, and it solved the problem far better than just yelling at him for breaking the rule.
Third, I never thought to ask when he rides when I’m not around. I’d told him no riding after 7 p.m. in the winter, when it gets dark by 5:30. What I didn’t know is that he and his friends meet up at the basketball courts a half mile from our house after dinner once a week, and ride over there to hang out. His headlight had died three weeks earlier, and he didn’t tell me because he thought I’d ban the meetups entirely. I didn’t ban them. I just bought two sets of extra-bright rechargeable lights, wrote his name on both, and told him if the lights die at any point when he’s out, he can text me for a ride, no yelling, no lecture. I also added a two-minute check of the lights and tire pressure to our Sunday chore list, so we catch dead batteries before he heads out.
The last question, the one that surprised me most, is whether he ever feels like he has to do something dangerous to fit in with the other kids riding. I just assumed Milo would make good choices if I told him what not to do. But he admitted that the day the crossing guard stopped him, he’d just done a dare to ride down the Main Street hill without braking, because all his friends had done it and he didn’t want to be called a coward. We made a concrete deal after that: any time he’s in a situation that feels unsafe, he can text me the code word “blue” and I’ll come get him, no questions, no punishment, no lecture later. He doesn’t have to make up an excuse, he just has to send the word. We haven’t needed it yet, but he says it makes him feel better knowing it’s there.
Last month, I caught Milo riding without his helmet. He’d left it at his friend’s house after a ride the day before, and he just wanted to run to the corner store for a soda. I took the scooter for a week, we talked through it again, and now he keeps a beat-up spare helmet hanging by the front door, just in case. It’s not perfect. I’m sure there are still small things he doesn’t tell me. But I’ve stopped treating buying the scooter and the safety lecture as the end of the work. It’s just another thing that needs a quick check-in every few months, same as homework or friend drama. It doesn’t take much, just a few questions that don’t start with “are you being safe.”
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