One mother’s “permission slip” is going viral after she posted it to Facebook. The permission slip giver her two 12-year-old sons permission to do something extraordinary: climb trees on their school’s property or anywhere else they would like. What prompted Julia Holcombe of Yardley, Pennsylvania to write the permission slip in the first place is an incident that took place after school one day.
Holcombe’s sons came home from school one day, telling her that an unidentified man approached them and insisted they get out of the tree. The man got their names and told them that if they fell out of the tree, the school could be sued. Because of this, the man warned, if they climbed the tree again, he would report them to their school’s principal.
Holcombe then decided to give them a sort of permission slip to carry with them in case anyone questioned them about climbing the tree again. In it, she promises not to sue the school if her children fall out of the tree because she feels that it is more important that her sons get to spend time outside getting exercise and spend with their friends. Holcombe goes on to say that the man’s reason for keeping her children from climbing the tree is “sad and ridiculous.”
She later posted this permission slip to Facebook and it soon took the internet by storm. Holcombe told TODAY Parents why she decided to post the permission slip to Facebook, indicating that school administrators today are so focused on preventing bad things from happening that they do so even if they are preventing good habits from taking root. They do this, she reasons, to prevent potential financial consequences. All she wants, as she states in her permission slip, is for her kids to be kids while they still can.