Bear Grylls’ Parenting Post Made Me Realize I Was Hovering Too Much — Here’s What Happened When I Stopped
Last Tuesday, I was clearing breakfast bowls when my phone lit up with a message from my sister-in-law. It was a screenshot of a Bear Grylls Instagram post, sent with the caption: “This is how we should be parenting.”
I wiped my hands on my jeans and read it. Bear was standing on some rocky outcrop, wind in his face, one arm around a boy who looked about eight. The quote underneath was something like: “We can either spend our energy protecting our children from every scrape, or we can spend it teaching them how to handle the scrapes they’re bound to get.” I remember staring at the words for a while. Then I laughed and sent back: “Easy for you to say, you’re Bear Grylls.”
But I didn’t forget it.
By Saturday, it was rattling around in my head again. We were at the neighbourhood playground, the one with the old wooden climbing tower that’s seen better days. My son Jesse, who is four and built like a pile of elastic bands, had decided he wanted to climb up the outside of the slide instead of using the steps. It’s not an especially high structure — maybe three metres at the top — but when you’re looking up at it from below, it might as well be a mountain.
I opened my mouth to say the usual thing. “Careful, Jesse.”
But something made me stop. Maybe it was Bear Grylls. Maybe it was the fact that Jesse says “careful” back to me in a silly voice now, which is probably a sign that it means nothing to him. So I said, instead: “What’s your plan?”
He looked at me like I’d asked him to solve a maths problem. “Plan?”
“Yeah. You’re going to climb the slide. What’s your plan for getting up without slipping?”
He thought about it. Then he pointed to the corner of the slide, where the plastic curves around and there’s a little ridge. “I’m going to hold that bit.” He said it like it was obvious. I told him that was a good plan, and I sat down on a bench nearby. Not too close, but close enough that I could be there in two steps if everything went wrong.
He climbed.
For about fifteen seconds, it was fine. He got halfway up, wedged one foot against the wooden frame, reached for the edge. And then his hand slipped. He came down on his bottom, bounced slightly, and landed on the wood chips. There was a silence. Then the wail.
I let him cry for a moment. Not because I’m cruel, but because I wanted to see if he was hurt or just shocked. His knee was scraped, the kind of scrape that looks worse than it actually is. No blood through his trousers, no twisted ankle. He held his breath, sucked in a sob, and looked at me. “I fell,” he said.
“I saw. Are you done, or do you want to try again?”
He sniffled. “Try again.”
This time, he didn’t go for the slide. He went around to the steps, climbed up normally, sat down at the top, and slid down. Then he did it again. And again. After the third run, he came over and said: “The outside is too slippery. The steps are faster.”
I nearly told him, “I could have told you that.” But I didn’t, because that’s not the point. He hadn’t learned it because I warned him. He’d learned it because his own body got to figure it out.
That’s the thing about “be careful.” It gets such a workout in parenting, but it’s one of the least useful phrases we have. It doesn’t tell a child anything specific. It doesn’t help them understand their own limits, or the physical world around them. It just turns their attention toward fear without giving them a strategy. “Careful” is a word we say to make ourselves feel better, not to make our children safer.
What’s actually useful is something like: “Where are your feet right now?” Or: “Can you find three places where your hands are really gripping?” Or: “What would you do if you felt unsteady up there?” Those questions do a few different things. They give the child a job to do. They encourage them to look at their surroundings and notice real information, like whether the surface is slippery or whether there’s a better handhold nearby. And they teach a habit that will follow them far beyond the playground: pause, look, decide.
I’ve started catching myself all the time now. At home, my daughter wanted to chop a banana with a normal knife. My first instinct was to say no, because she’s six and the word “knife” feels like an accident waiting to happen. But I remembered the playground, and I remembered Bear Grylls’ post, and I sat down with her instead. I showed her how to hold the handle, how to keep her other hand like a claw, away from the blade. She did it slowly, her tongue poking out of the corner of her mouth. She was more focused than I’d seen her all day. The world didn’t end. Nobody got cut. She just learned that a knife is a tool with rules, not a forbidden object to be frightened of.
This is the part of the Bear Grylls thing that’s easy to misunderstand. He’s not telling us to let our kids free-climb cliffs alone in the dark with no ropes. That would be stupid, and he wouldn’t do that with his own children either. What he’s pointing at is the difference between risk that teaches and danger that harms. A child climbing a three-metre slide and falling onto wood chips is a risk. A child running across a busy car park is a danger. One of those is worth allowing, even encouraging. The other needs to be stopped, every time. The goal isn’t to remove all risk from childhood. It’s to let kids practice with smaller risks while the stakes are still low, so that when they’re older and the real risks are bigger, they’ve already got some internal compass.
At the same time, I’m not pretending this comes naturally. The first time Jesse fell, my whole body tensed. My legs actually twitched, ready to run over. I had to physically keep myself seated on that bench. That’s hard. There’s a voice in your head that says a good parent protects their child from pain, full stop. And then there’s another voice, the quieter one, that remembers your own childhood. The tree you climbed and fell out of. The time you crashed your bike and limped home. The way you learned that the world is real and solid, and that falling is a part of moving through it.
I want my kids to get a few bruises. Not because I’m tough, and not because I don’t care. Because bruises fade. But knowing what your body can and can’t do? That’s the foundation for everything else. It’s how kids learn to trust themselves. And the alternative, the constant hovering, the endless “careful” and “no, don’t” and “get down,” teaches a very different lesson: that you don’t trust them to manage their own bodies. That the world is too dangerous. That they need an adult to tell them when they’re safe.
I don’t want that. I want them to grow up with the sense that they can handle a scrape, a fall, a mistake. I want them to know the feeling of getting back up and trying again, and to learn that feeling before life gets complicated enough to really hurt.
We went back to that playground the next week. Jesse, of course, made a beeline for the slide. But this time, he didn’t try to climb the outside. He walked up the steps, sat down, and slid. Then he got off and said, “I’m going to try the pole now.” The pole is a metal bar next to the platform, and kids slide down it. It’s not very tall, but it’s new to him. He wrapped his arms and legs around it and hung there uncertainly for a moment. Then he let go and landed in a heap. He grinned.
“That was fun,” he said. “Can I do it again?”
I said yes.
I’m not sure I’ll ever be as relaxed about all this as Bear Grylls looks in that photo. I still say “be careful” without thinking, especially when I’m tired or distracted. But now I hear myself when I say it, and sometimes I add what I actually mean. “Be careful” turns into “That looks interesting. What’s your first move?” It’s not a perfect system, and I don’t think it ever will be. But Jesse is learning to plan before he climbs. And I’m learning to let him.
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