Like many people around the world, the last couple of years has been difficult for my family and I. 2020 was filled with fear and uncertainty. 2021 brought some sense of normalcy back, but social distancing, masking, and other measures still took a toll.
Through all of this I thought my children were doing quite well. They were both able to attend school in-person. My older son was still playing competitive sports. It never occurred to me to check on my younger son’s mental health. He seemed okay most of the time. He spent a lot of time watching YouTube and playing video games, but I didn’t think anything was unusual.
Near the end of 2021 and beginning of 2022, I started to notice a massive change. He pretty much stopped talking, except for one word answers here and there. He began to become more withdrawn. He went from spending some of his time watching videos and playing video games to spending all of his time doing those things. A lot of unfortunate things happened in our community as well. Young people were taking their own lives with alarming frequency, and much of the discussion among many parents was now focused exclusively on mental health. Still, I thought my child was perfectly fine, until I could feel in the depths of my soul that he most definitely was not.
I thought helping him find his “thing” would help him a lot, but we had the worst time finding out what his thing was. He didn’t enjoy sports like his brother. He’s much more introverted as well. He had friends, but he didn’t like to play with them for more than a few minutes at a time. He would play with his cousins sometimes, but then withdraw again shortly after. Art was his thing for a while, but that went to pieces during the pandemic. Then one day I mentioned to him that I used to skateboard when I was his age.
My neighbor taught me to ride a skateboard back in the day. He even gave me my first real board. In those days, skateboarding was pretty much considered a crime, at least that’s how it was in our town. Skateboarders were punks and misfits. My parents hated that I was a skater — though, to be quite honest, I was not a very good skater at all. I did fit the part and dress the part well, and my friends were accepting of the fact that I was not as good as them.
Anyway, my son took an interest in these stories. Skateboarding drew a look in his eyes that I hadn’t seen in months. My older son had a cheap skateboard that he never used, so he let his brother use it. We started the way I did as a kid: riding down the short driveway in front of our house. The first time he rode all the way down without falling was amazing. His eyes lit up, he smiled, and I saw his personality shine through once again.
Skateboarding brought joy back to his life, and now he skates every day. I recently bought him a better board, helmet, and pads. We started visiting the local skatepark every weekend. He stays out there for hours at a time. He’s learning to do tricks and ride in ways that I couldn’t even imagine as a kid. After only a few months, he’s already better than I ever was, and he’s only getting better. It really is an amazing thing. I have seen him change completely from where he was just a little while ago. He has much fewer down days. He is way more social and everything in his life is showing improvement. We owe it all to skateboarding. I will never look at skaters and skateboards the same again.
