Fire!

This is the week of me writing about my kids doing dangerous inappropriate things. First the bow and arrow, not fire. Every summer my son has a cookout on his birthday for his birthday dinner. Like all boys, he's much more interested in the fire than in the hot dogs. This past summer he learned how to burn things with a magnifying glass and a couple of times during the summer I let him light up piles of paper and cardboard that needed to be burned, as well as letting him start his cookout fire. Give a boy a taste of freedom and  you can't take it back. He's been itching to start some sort of fire down here in Texas and I had told him that if he could figure out how to start one with a bow drill then it was ok by me. He's been working on a bow drill for months on and off. Finally he was figuring that it wasn't going to happen and he had been begging me to let him use a lighter to start a fire. Starting a fire is one thing, playing with a lighter is quite another and I told him no. A week ago I met him half way and let him use my Swedish Fire Steel to make sparks and see what he could do. I showed him how it works and told him to go research how to make fire with it. Well, he's spent some time on youtube looking up videos and he's pretty much got it mastered. The boy is a fire starter.
Like with the bow and arrow, I have conflicting thoughts. He's a regular boy and he wants to mess with dangerous stuff like fire. On one hand, I really don't want him burned. On the other hand, if he's going to end up doing it anyway I might as well show him how to do is safely and let him do it when conditions are right so that he doesn't burn down the neighborhood. We live in a place where pretty much everyone burns their leaves and other yard debris, so having a small fire is fine. Hopefully by teaching him how to do it right, how to be safe and how to judge weather conditions he'll learn when things are safe. For now, I still have control of when the fires are started and I'd rather know that things are burning than be surprised by it. I'm aware that this whole thing might backfire, and his ability to start fires at the drop of a hat could get him badly hurt or in serious trouble. It sucks, but there's no real right answers in parenting a lot of the time. So much depends on the individual children, who they are, and how life is when you have to decide on these sorts of things. Not everyone is ready to go out back and start fires when they're 8, but then again, sometimes they are.