The Other Man: OK, Knock It Off Before You Get Someone Else Killed

This morning, Jordan Romero must be the happiest 13-year-old boy on the face of the earth.

Having become the youngest person ever to summit Mount Everest, by two whole years, he can certainly tell all of his middle-school friends how he cheated death while climbing the world’s tallest mountain.

But why does he need to cheat death at all?

There’s no way, to my mind, that Jordan hasn’t been somewhat brainwashed into doing this. Take this line from his press conference, in which he sounds more like a middle-aged hockey fan than a teenager with his whole life ahead of him.

It’s something I’ve always wanted to do before I die – I just happen to be doing it at this age. I happen to be going for a world record. But I just want to climb it.

Apparently, Jordan’s team climbed from the Chinese side of the mountain to avoid Nepal’s very smart age limit of 16 for Everest candidates. And what did his mother say when the BBC asked if a 13-year-old could make an informed decision to climb Everest? Why, his father will be with him the whole time, of course.

Jessica Dubroff’s father was with her the whole time when the 7-year-old attempted to become the youngest person to fly an airplane across the US. And flight instructor Joe Reid, a fully qualified pilot, was there as well. That didn’t stop them all from dying outside of Cheyenne, Wyoming, on a stormy night in the spring of 1996, less than a day into Jessica’s record-setting attempt.

It must be said that the National Transportation Safety Board, which investigated Jessica’s accident, concluded in its report that the crash was conditionally Reid’s fault. He agreed to take off in heavy rain and wind so the flight could reach its next city and fulfill its media obligations.

This brings us to the first problem: the media can’t stop itself from treating these exercises in forced maturity like they’re a good thing. I mean, it’s hard not to laugh and cheer on when you see roles like Hit Girl filling our silver screens:

But portrayals like these only reinforce the idea that parents can always dictate their kids’ beliefs, even if their ends are opportunistic, neglectful or dangerous.

Jordan’s own agency into his worldwide mountain-climbing feats is at best arguable (he started at 10). And there’s no way Jessica, at seven, could have realized the full extent of the danger she was in.

So is there even a limit for how young someone has to be before taking deadly risks becomes unacceptable? Would five have been too young to mount Everest for everybody’s taste? How about sixteen months? JonBenet Ramsay’s death spurred a backlash against young girls in beauty pageants, but I guess operating a ten-ton airplane is OK.

But when the media’s involved, money’s involved. The San Francisco Examiner reported that people were surprised by how Jessica’s father could afford the tens of thousands of dollars for her flight training and cross-country trip, given how he was in bankruptcy and how Jessica herself spent her toddler years squatting with her mother in an abandoned house in Massachusetts.

That wasn’t on anyone’s mind when Jessica was flying high. Her father was trying to set up a plane ride with President Clinton when she reached Washington, and ABC News, Guinness and National Geographic were all in on the trip itself. And of course books and film rights and all that were in the cards if she made it.

Which brings me to the second problem: if the government knows better, why aren’t they proactive in regulating these risky behaviors? Only after Jessica died did a “concerned” and “horrified” Congress pass laws to prevent trainee pilots from going for world records.

In one case, a government did step in. Last year, Dutch child services took partial custody of Laura Dekker, now 14, who had planned to become the youngest person to sail around the world. Reportedly, they had to step in to stop her father, who had already sent Laura sailing to England “to prove herself”. But that kind of pre-emptive move wouldn’t have happened in America.

Worst of all, these kids can’t have normal childhoods. While most kids are learning how to deal with other people, educating themselves and otherwise gaining control of their bodies, these kids are spending months and years with adults in a situation far above their pay grades.

And I can’t imagine what it would be like to hit your peak at seven, or even 13.

We see it quite often, actually, with child actors, and we all know how well-adjusted and successful they are once they grow up. In fact, the problem is so widespread that there are charitable organizations out there helping former child actors come to terms with their diminished fame. So are we going to need a similar agency for child world-record holders?

Maybe. A couple of years before Jessica’s ill-fated flight, Vicki Van Meter did fly successfully across the US at age 11. And the next year she flew to Scotland. The trips garnered quite a bit of fame at the time, including a trip to the White House and a book deal.

She’s dead now, having taken her own life in 2008 at age 26. She had been suffering from severe depression in the months prior. I have a hard time believing her flights had nothing to do with it — certainly, spending all those hours in the air didn’t help her prepare for the rough patches that life would take her through once the Today show stopped being interested in her.

It sounds like I’m blaming these kids, and they really have very few dogs in this hunt, which I guess is the whole point. But the Guinness organization, governments and parents need to work together to stop these reckless gambles before someone else dies. Because someone has got to know better.