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skateboarding

Family

Dad's response to daughter's crash on a skate ramp is a masterclass in awesome parenting

A beautiful blend of empathy, encouragement and empowerment.

@chasing.sage/Instagram

This dad exemplifies stellar parenting.

As a parent, it's not always easy to know how to help your kids learn from life experiences. Some lessons they learn naturally and others they learn through parental guidance, but discerning which is which and how those things overlap can be challenging.

Kids don't come with instruction manuals, of course, but sometimes we see examples of great parenting we can point to and say, "AHA! That's how it's done."

One such example comes from a dad named Robert. He's been teaching his 5-year-old daughter Aubrin to skateboard and set up a mini half pipe for her to learn on. In a video on Instagram, Robert shared his interchanges with Aubrin after she crashed hard on the ramp during a lesson.

It's a sweet video that doubles as a masterclass in effective parenting. Robert communicates with a perfect blend of empathy, encouragement and empowerment, which gives his daughter exactly what she needs to tackle her fears and persevere in what she wants to do.

Even his initial question after she fell—"Did it scare you or did it hurt you?"—is helpful for making her more aware of what she's actually feeling as well as knowing how best to help her.

Seeing this gentle parenting scenario play out is just so heartwarming. (And if Aubrin's voice sounds familiar, you may have seen the viral "stuckasaurus" video in which she offered delightful color commentary while snowboarding in a dinosaur suit.)

Watch:

Robert explained his thinking behind the way he responded to Aubrin's fall:

"Trying something new can be scary but re-trying something after slamming can be terrifying.

I had to re-gain her trust and she needed to re-establish her confidence after this slam and it was a tough but beautiful rollercoaster experience.

This is one of the biggest psychological battles we face as humans, because once that negative experience has made its home in our brain it’s very hard to get it out.

I know from intense personal experience that a bad fall can have long lasting [psychological] effects and truly believe, that when possible, it’s best to get back up and try it again with the goal being to end the session with a positive experience; to not have that negative memory ruminating in your head until the next time you return to try.

I’ve been asked a lot 'How do you know what to say in these moments?' and the truth is I absolutely don’t know what to say.

Seeing her slam sucks the air out of my lungs and my heart drops but I just try to stay calm and redirect with some questions or comments while surveying the situation. A parent's emotions (depending on how you instinctively react) will oftentimes influence the child’s emotional response and it’s my goal to remove my influence and allow her to just be, to feel, to hurt at her pace and it allows me to get a better reading of how she’s truly feeling in these pivotal moments.

Ultimately I just respond from the heart. If you calmly lead with empathy and support without applying pressure you’ll do just fine."

Beautiful insight and advice. Unfortunately, many parents are raising kids while working through wounds from their own childhoods, and when you're battling parental instincts that aren't particularly healthy or helpful, having it all laid out like this is really valuable. Commenters on Instagram and Reddit have expressed how much they appreciate seeing supportive parenting in action.

"I actually got emotional watching this..." wrote one person. "I am learning so much from your posts!!! As someone whose parents led from a place of fear a lot of the time, this is showing me so much possibility of what the opposite can look like. Thank you for being so open, we are all made the better from it."

"I wish I had a dad like you growing up. She’s so lucky," wrote another.

"Made me smile and also as a grown ass man, gave me watery eyes - as someone that never had this kind of treatment growing up and kind of needed it - this is the kind of dad I will be if I ever meet someone and have kids," shared another.

Whether we were raised by gentle, supportive parents or the opposite, we can all recognize effective parenting when we see it. Thank you, Robert, for sharing such a stellar example we can all watch and learn from.

You can follow Robert and Aubrin's family adventures on Instagram (@chasing.sage).

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4 of the 6 women's skateboarding Olympic medalists are 13-years-old or younger

Reuters/Twitter

Welp, the two skateboarding events added to the Olympics this year have wrapped up for the women's teams, and the results are historic in more ways than one.

Japan's Kokona Hiraki, age 12, just won the silver medal in women's park skateboarding, making her Japan's youngest Olympic medalist ever. Great Britain's Sky Brown, who was 12 when she qualified for the Tokyo Olympics and is now 13, won the bronze, making her Great Britain's youngest medalist ever. And those two medal wins mean that two-thirds of the six medalists in the two women's skateboarding events are age 13 or younger. (The gold and silver medalists in women's street skateboarding, Japan's Momiji Nishiya and Brazil's Rayssa Leal, are also 13.)

That's mind-blowing.


By the way, the other two medalists are ages 16 and 19. Nothing but teens and tweens at the top.

One of the reasons for adding skateboarding to the Olympics was to draw in younger viewers and inject the games with a jolt of youthful spirit. Mission accomplished, if these skateboarding medals are any indication.

13 and 12. These kids are several years away from being able to drive a car, and yet they are already Olympic champions on four wheels. Amazing.

Skateboarding is a unique sport in that it's performed on a wheeled device that is in no way attached to a person's body. And despite the laid-back, chill vibe of the athletes who compete in the sport, perfecting the tricks and skills it takes to compete at this level takes an enormous amount of practice.

It can also be dangerous. Sky Brown took a bad spill at age 11, suffering a skull fracture and broken arm that threatened her Olympic dreams when the games were originally scheduled for 2020. By then, she'd already been a professional skateboarder for two years, after becoming the world's youngest pro skater at age 9.

A pro at age 9. Kids these days, I tell you.

Despite the pressures at this level of competition, it's clear in the Olympic footage that these kids are doing what they love and having a great time doing it. The camaraderie and outward shows of support among the skateboarding athletes are palpable, which is both a testament to their character and to the culture of skateboarding itself.

With such young stars already crushing the field, it seems that the competition in this sport will only get better. These kids and other rising competitors will undoubtedly be even more exciting to watch in Paris 2024. Already looking forward to it.

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Okay, so skateboarding is officially an awesome addition to the Olympics

NBC Sports/YouTube

For the first time, skateboarding is an official Olympic sport, and after watching the men's and women's street skateboarding events this weekend, our family has decided it's officially a totally welcome addition.

I grew up with a skateboarding brother during the earliest years of Tony Hawk's career, so the sport itself isn't unfamiliar to me. But I've never really followed skate competitions and wasn't sure how it would translate into an Olympic event. As it turns out, there are several things that make it both entertaining and refreshing to watch in comparison with other sports.

For one, let's talk about the "uniform" the athletes wear. As debates rage over volleyball bikinis and gymnastics leotards, here are the male and female skateboarders in long, loose pants and baggy t-shirts. They are the most comfortable-looking Olympians I've ever seen (being out in the humid Japanese heat notwithstanding). They look like they just popped off the couch after watching a movie and decided to go out and hop on their skateboard.

Secondly, hearing the announcers call out the names of the tricks was surprisingly entertaining. We laughed out loud as they strung together words like "That was a gnarlyFrontside Half Cab Kickflip to a Nollie Backside 180!" as if those are just normal things everyone recognizes. Half the time it sounded like they were making things up (they weren't, of course), which we found just delightful. At the same time, the announcers were good about explaining what the tricks entailed so that those of us who aren't familiar with the ins and outs could appreciate what we were seeing.

Third, it was awesome to see the chill culture of skateboarding take root on the world's biggest, most intense sports stage. Skaters are competitive, no doubt, but they also all cheer each other on and seem so supportive of one another. In skateboarding, anyone landing an epic trick is a cause for celebration, and anyone who stumbles gets a pat on the back and a high five for the attempt. There's no cutthroat vibe here, just a unique combo of concentration and laid-backness, which is fun to witness.

Surely, there was heartbreak among those who hoped to medal, as there is in any sport. But the vibe was just different than it is n most sports. I mean, this is Margielyn Didal, who finished 7th and had some hard falls during the finals. She was like this pretty much the whole time. Pure joy.

And how about the diversity in ages, especially among the women skaters? We almost ended up with two teens and a 34-year-old on the podium in the women's street competition, with a spread of 21 years between the youngest and oldest. (American skater Alexis Sablone turns 35 in a couple of weeks and ended up in 4th place after the final trick.) The gold and silver medal winners are both 13 years old, and the bronze winner is 16. And while the young skaters dominated in the end, Sablone showed that it's not just a sport for the youth.

(But let's also take a moment of awe for these 13-year-olds, Momiji Nishiya of Japan and Rayssa Leal of Brazil. Holy moly. So much talent and such great sportsmanship and such a young age.)

Finally, let's have a moment of appreciation for the sport itself. It took a long time for the athletic world to fully appreciate the skill and practice it takes to do things like flip a moving board with four wheels several feet into the air with your feet, make it do just the right number of flips and turns in the air beneath you, stop it in exactly the right position to slide down a railing over a flight of stairs, and then land it on the ground—all while the board and you are flying through the air—without falling off. When skaters do it perfectly, it looks easy. But it's a million little movements and balances and weight distributions and calculations that make these tricks work, and as we saw from how many they don't land how hard it really is.

Also, they land on concrete when they fall. Ouch. And sometimes things like this happen:

Double ouch.

Our family and friends have thoroughly enjoyed seeing skateboarding take its place on the Olympic stage, and are looking forward to seeing the park skateboarding competition coming up. Good move making skateboarding an official Olympic sport, finally. Definitely recommend checking out the highlights if you missed it:

THIRTEEN-year-old Momiji Nishiya wins gold in street skateboarding | Tokyo Olympics | NBC Sportswww.youtube.com

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Two 12-year-old girls qualified to compete in the first-ever Olympic skateboarding event

Sky Brown/Instagram, Kokona Hiraki/Instagram

Very few 12-year-olds get the chance to make history, but a pair of skateboarding phenoms may be headed to Tokyo this summer to do just that as two of the youngest-ever summer Olympians.

Kokona Hiraki and Sky Brown aren't you're typical skateboarders, nor are they your typical preteens. You don't get to the Olympics at 12 by being ordinary. Both girls have qualified to compete in the first-ever Olympic skateboarding event, with Hiraki skating for Japan and Brown representing Great Britain. Both girls compete in the park skateboarding event, which involves doing tricks on skate park-style ramps and bowls. Street skateboarding, which involves tricks done on stairs, handrails, benches, walls and slopes, will also be making its debut as an Olympic sport.

Brown currently ranks as the third-best female park skateboarding competitor in the world at age 12 (though she'll be 13 by the time she reaches Tokyo). Hiraki ranks sixth in the world. At age 12.

Did I mention they are 12 years old? TWELVE. Unreal.

Hiraki will compete as the youngest Olympian ever from Japan. Five of the top ten ranking female park skaters, including the top two, are Japanese, so competition from the country is fierce. But Hiraki told The Japan Times she didn't let nerves get the better of her at the qualifier.

"I was enjoying it just as usual," she said. "I wasn't as nervous as usual."

Sky Brown would have been Britain's youngest ever Olympian if the Olympics hadn't been postponed by a year, but that year turned out to be a good thing for her chances to compete anyway. In June of 2020, Brown suffered horrifying injuries during a training fall in which she fractured her skull and broke her wrist and hand. The fact that she was able to recover, continue training, and then take home second place in the Olympic qualifier is truly something.


Brown doesn't seem too fazed by any of her skating success or the pressures many athletes feel trying to get to the Olympics. "I'm always wonderfully surprised to see where it takes me," she told ESPN. "So, I'm not too stressed about the Olympics. I just want to see what happens and enjoy the journey."

Gracious, these babies and their cool-as-a-cucumber confidence.

Last year, skateboarding legend Tony Hawk told ESPN that Brown is "a unicorn" in the world of skating.

"She has incredible potential," he said. "She could definitely be one of the best female skaters ever, if not one of the best, well-rounded skaters ever, regardless of gender. She has such confidence, such force, even at such a young age. The way she's able to learn new tricks and the way she absorbs direction, it's so rare."

Whether they end up medaling or not, to qualify for the Olympics at 12 is extraordinary and their futures in the sport are incredibly bright. Go, girls, go.

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