On a winter Sunday evening, in the basement of an apartment tower in Long Island City, my 5-year-old daughter watched her brother work his way up a wall of plastic holds and asked whether she could try it too. She loved it and we have gone back almost every Sunday since because she asks to.
There was no grand plan behind me taking her to the bouldering gym; I didn’t approach rock climbing as a teacher and professor thinking about how climbing may be deeply formative for a child. We started going bouldering simply because it looked like something fun to do indoors on a cold winter Sunday.
I wasn’t trying to teach resilience or confidence or anything else for that matter. But my daughter saw something difficult and wanted to know whether she could do it, and it didn’t take long for me to realize how powerful this was for her socially and physically. She wasn’t interested in proving what she could already do; she wanted to find out whether she could do something she couldn’t do yet.
So this summer, she decided she was going to finish a long traverse across a 25-foot-long wall. Instead of climbing up, the path ran sideways, hand over hand, with barely anything beneath her feet. It took her many weeks, and during those weeks, she fell more times than either of us could count. She never once asked to stop.
An unexpected community
I did think that climbing may make her stronger and I even thought it might make her more confident. But I never anticipated that it would introduce her to and make her part of a unique community.
Children stay with activities that become part of who they are and where they are known.
People at the gym knew her by name; they knew the route she had been working on, and they knew she was close. She knew them too: the college student who taught her to drop her heel, the middle-aged woman who always asked how the traverse was going and the older boy who waited so she could take her turn.
She had found a place among people who were not her classmates, not her relatives and not even her age.
She also accepted their help, openly and with curiosity. A 5-year-old who has decided to do something herself is not usually receptive to advice. At the wall, though, I learned that advice isn’t criticism — it is simply what climbers offer one another. She listened to another climber explain where to place her foot, tried it, absorbed it and appreciated the feedback.
I have spent much of my career studying what happens when the institutions that once knew Americans by name begin to disappear. I was thrilled to find one in a bouldering gym.
Climbing offers something different from team sports
Watching this unfold also made me think about schools, particularly girls’ schools. Many are already investing seriously in athletics and thinking creatively about how to help girls develop confidence and resilience and encourage healthy risk-taking beyond the classroom. My daughter’s experience certainly isn’t an argument that every school should build a climbing wall. But it did make me wonder whether climbing gets a few things especially right.
We know many girls leave organized athletics as they get older. Part of the reason is opportunity, but another part is structure. As children grow older, play increasingly gives way to tryouts, cuts and selection, and more and more activities become competitions over who gets to stay.
Climbing is built differently, I quickly learned. The sport belongs to a small set of athletic pursuits — martial arts, skateboarding and mountain biking among them — where your opponent is a problem rather than a person. There is no bench because no one is waiting to replace you, and there are no cuts because there is no roster.
A climber is matched against a route and not a competitor. When she falls — and falling is simply part of climbing — my daughter drops onto the mat and gets back up. There is no laughing at the competition, either; the nearest few people tell her it was a good try and they truly mean it.
The sense of belonging may matter even more than the climbing itself. Children stay with activities that become part of who they are and where they are known.
Climbing also offers something modern childhood has largely squeezed out: manageable physical risk. It asks children to do something that feels difficult without exposing them to serious danger, and that is where confidence grows.
Genuine mixed-age connection
The bouldering gym gave my daughter another gift — genuine mixed-age connection. A few children, but mostly teenagers, college students, and adults in their 30s and 40s all share the same walls and work through the same problems. One route may be suitable for a child, another for an experienced climber and a third for only a handful of people in the building, yet they all exist within arm’s reach of one another.
Developmental psychologist Peter Gray has argued that children benefit from mixed-age play. Watching this gym every Sunday, it’s hard not to see that he is right. Older climbers naturally encourage younger ones while younger climbers see what is possible. Everyone learns from someone at a different stage of mastery, and so much of the age sorting that we see in society fades away in the gym.
At the end of the summer, on what must have been her 50th attempt, my daughter finished the traverse. Hand over hand, she worked her way across the wall, placing each foot carefully on each ledge. When she reached the end, she dropped onto the mat, exhausted and smiling, and the room clapped. The people cheering had watched her fall off that route for weeks and come back to it every Sunday. The gym gave her a sticker for her water bottle.
There is nothing especially remarkable about a climbing wall. It is plywood, mats and plastic holds. But every Sunday my daughter walks into a room where people know her name, picks something she cannot yet do, falls in front of everyone and keeps going. I never expected her to find that kind of place in a basement in Long Island City.