Strolling

Although winter began quite late, it has basically been cold and miserable here in Toronto since January of this year. It's getting nicer out, so today I decided I would take my son out for a walk.

Here's the thing - although he's six, I still put him in a stroller. I don't always do this, only when I know we're walking quite a long way. And the stroller I have is huge, so he remains comfortable in it.

That being said, people look at my son and I quite strangely - after all, he is six. I, like many others, kind of felt that this is something he would "grow out of". But then, this is because I live in a world where driving is the norm.

The reality is that I walk everywhere - I don't own a car. No one thinks twice about strapping a 6-year old into a car to drive three blocks to a store, and yet putting the same child in a stroller when you're walking 5k seems like coddling.

But I wonder about my own thoughts around this, and how they are shaped by my own paranoia about "raising" a child, and the very idea of child development, and we see how certain things, like putting a kid in a stroller, seem awkward, but driving a child the same distance seems perfectly normal, and one begins to see how arbitrary this process is.

This post is even a kind of parental defense of the abnormal, or an apology for not driving.

Isn't that also kind of odd?