Judge by ability, not age

What is the “appropriate” age to watch an R-rated movie, take public transportation alone, get your ears pierced, get your nose pierced?

The general consensus would probably be that it’s all relative. Society imposes legal age restrictions on certain privileges, but most people agree that it depends on the individual. Anyone who’s spent five minutes in a high school hallway knows that some 16-year-olds seem more like third-graders while others act as if they could be working in a Las Vegas casino. Does it make sense, then, to use age as the sole benchmark for social or emotional development?

These questions have framed much of the discussion around Abby Sunderland, the 16-year-old who set out in January to circumnavigate the Earth by herself in a 40-foot sailing vessel called Wild Eyes. Last week Sunderland ran into trouble amid 30-foot swells in the Indian Ocean, fell out of communication for three days and was finally located (by a Qantas Airbus that had been chartered to look for her) adrift in the Indian Ocean, where she was eventually rescued Saturday by a French fishing boat.

The jubilation at her rescue was soured somewhat by the news Monday that Sunderland’s father had a reality show in the works. By the end of the day, he’d reportedly severed ties with the television producers, though this did little to quiet the chorus of public disapproval about the wisdom of sending a 16-year-old to sea in the first place. Everyone from television interviewers to Internet commenters to “people surveyed” on websites deemed Abby’s parents irresponsible and attention-seeking. And while Abby’s sailing coach stood by her abilities, the boat builder who made Wild Eyes told reporters that Abby wasn’t strong enough to handle a boat of that size in winter storm conditions.

And where is Abby amid all this? She’s holed up with a crew of French fisherman who will take her to the Kerguelen Islands, a desolate archipelago in the South Indian Ocean occupied only by a handful of researchers. From there she’ll be picked up by a larger ship and taken to an island off the coast of Madagascar, a journey that will take no less than 10 days. Aside from her disappointment about losing her boat, she appears astonishingly composed about her circumstances and sanguine about the future. She’s writing on her blog and talking about possibly writing a book .

In other words, this is not a typical 16-year-old (one can only imagine the text messages generated by your average teenaged girl stuck in such a predicament: “OMG fishrman R gross, also am missing Glee .”) This is a girl of some maturity and skill, a girl who essentially grew up on a boat, who is, like her father, a master sailor and who possessed the judgment to activate her emergency beacon when she knew she was in trouble. It’s also worth noting that she would hardly have been the first young person to sail around the world by herself. In the last two years alone, three teens, including Abby’s brother Zac, have successfully made the voyage.

But, in the words of parents everywhere, if all the other kids are jumping off a cliff, does that mean you should do it too? Objectively speaking, no. But what if someone is an exceptional cliff jumper? What if someone has both the innate ability and the training to jump off a cliff in a way that was relatively safe as well as groundbreaking in some way? Should this person not jump because she is 16 and not 18 or 20 or 26? Should the novelty of her youthfulness outweigh the novelty of her ability to do this thing in the first place?

People who jump off cliffs (or sail the world by themselves) are already such outliers that there’s something rather superfluous about imposing conventional restrictions on them. But it’s hard to be that objective about kids and life-threatening activities. Maybe that’s why the “exceptional” kids that tend to be most celebrated are those whose exceptionalism has both entertainment value and a decent measure of physical safety (emotional and psychological safety is a whole other story). As a culture, we love our child actors, our tiny figure skaters, the sixth-grader whose performance of a Lady Gaga song goes viral on YouTube. The young sailors and mountaineers? They’ve just got bad parents.

In other words, we like our kids precocious but not particularly adventurous. And what kind of childhood is that?

mdaum@latimescolumnists.com