Before she got on the plane, our eight-year-old daughter Clara took a marker and wrote the word BRAVE across the tops of her hands — three letters on one fist, two on the other — so that when she pressed them together, they spelled a single word.
BRAVE.
Then she climbed to fifteen thousand feet over the green hills of New Zealand and jumped.
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Two Places in the World
There are only two countries on Earth, we were told, where a child this young can legally make a tandem skydive. One is in Scandinavia. The other is New Zealand, where the minimum requirement is essentially that you are large enough to fit safely in the harness and the jumpsuit.
We were in New Zealand as a family, and we made a decision that some people will think is reckless and others will understand completely: we were going to give our children the chance to do this. Not push them. Offer it. We told them the night before — deliberately, so the fear would not have weeks to grow — and we braced for at least one or two of them to decide that the ground was, on reflection, just fine.
Not one of them backed out. And the smallest of them wrote a word on her hands and led the way.
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Why BRAVE
We did not tell Clara to write on her hands. She thought of it herself. Somewhere in her eight-year-old mind, she understood something that takes most adults much longer to learn: that brave does not mean unafraid. Brave means afraid and going anyway. She was scared. Of course she was scared. So she wrote the word she needed to read, put it where she would see it, and pressed her fists together against the wind at fifteen thousand feet.
Her instructor had a small camera mounted to his wrist. It caught the whole thing — the open door, the drop, the sixty seconds of freefall, and Clara with her fists pressed together, the word visible against the rushing sky, a grin on her face that no amount of fear could hold down.
That photograph — our eight-year-old, fists together, BRAVE, grinning, falling — lives in my wallet. All the time. When I need a little extra courage, I take it out, look at it, and do the thing.
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What the Photo Means
We travel for a lot of reasons. The views. The history. The food. The time together. But underneath all of it is something harder to name — a belief that the experiences we give our children become part of the people they grow into.
Clara does not just believe she is brave. She has evidence. She has a photograph of the moment she was most afraid and did it anyway. When she faces something hard in her life — and she will, because everyone does — she has somewhere in her a girl who wrote a word on her hands and jumped from fifteen thousand feet. That is not something we could have taught her with words. She had to write it on her own knuckles and prove it to herself.
She was eight. She talks about it with pure joy. And every time we look at that photograph, we are reminded of the entire reason we do any of this.
The practical details, briefly: We jumped with Skydive Auckland — thirteen of us in our group, one after the other, until the whole extended family had gone. The minimum age in New Zealand is governed by fit rather than a number — if a child fits the harness and jumpsuit, they can do a tandem jump. Budget roughly NZD $250–350 per person. Tell your children the night before, not weeks in advance. And pay for the tandem jumper’s footage. You will want the photograph. |
Would your child do it? Would you? Tell us in the comments — and if you have a BRAVE story of your own, we’d love to hear it.
