This fall I saw a six-year-old girl top-rope a 5.10 in Indian Creek. The route’s called Gorilla, a generic hand crack with an off-width pod that you have to wiggle past. I was quite astonished to see this little girl use legitimately proper crack-climbing technique, even using heel-toe cams through the off-width. She also displayed incredible stamina and focus, especially for a six-year-old. It took her probably 40 minutes to get up the crack but, by golly, she did it!

I also have a six-year-old daughter, and while she’s talented and amazing at many things, I can’t imagine her climbing a 5.10 at Indian Creek at this stage of life. Had I not seen this other girl crushing the Creek with my own eyes, I would have assumed that crack climbing was simply too technical, painful, and miserable for a six-year-old. In fact, it’s all those things for most of us on our best days!

Exposing my own kids to a lifestyle in which you spend all day outside at crags and camp in cold places away from your normal routine and warm bed is often a challenge. Having zero expectations for how these days unfold helps. Even when I set the lowest of bars—“I just want to get one burn on my project! Just one damn burn!!”—I have had many days when all we do is half a warmup, then spend the entire afternoon wrangling a nap for a three-year-old who’s in a wretched and atavistic mood. But so it goes.

I know enough to know not to jump to judgements or conclusions about other climbing families who are trying to find that balance, too. You may happen to see someone’s kids at their worst moment, crying and screaming and having no fun at all because their stupid parents dragged them out to the stupid cliff so they could selfishly rock climb on their stupid projects … but that’s only ever a small part of the story. There’s so much going on behind that tantrum (they could be hungry, tired, sick, getting a new tooth). It almost certainly does not mean what you think it means.

This goes in the opposite direction as well. Seeing kids effortlessly sending the gnar or just having enjoyable and fun days at the crags with their smiling, fit, and happy fucking parents belies what I’m certain are many other days when it wasn’t so easy for them.

But there are also places where, perhaps, some critical scrutiny is warranted in order to best navigate the ethics of exposing children to this risk-managed but also high-consequence activity that is rock climbing.

The widely publicized “youngest rope ascent” of El Capitan by an 8-year-old boy comes to mind as an occasion to take a closer look at some of these thorny ethical questions. Hearing this news reminded me of an article Krista Langlois wrote for Outside called, “I Don’t Care if Your Toddler Climbs a Mountain,” which basically argues that setting “youngest” records of one kind or another instills an unhealthy attitude toward outdoor recreation.

At first blush, the story about this eight-year-old boy climbing El Capitan has the superficial gloss of being a feel-good, awesome story of a precocious big-wall climber doing something unexpected and notable—but when some of the details are revealed and you see the push by the marketing-savvy father to get himself on TV and blast this spray all over social media, or you look at the crowd-funding campaign he launched to produce more videos promoting his son as a “world-class climber,” and when you suspect that this dad is actually and perversely using climbing with his kid to promote his own businesses, it all starts to feel pretty gross.

El Cap Actually Isn’t a Good Place for Kids