A Canadian mother took her little girl to the local skate park for the first time after months of trying to convince her to go, and things didn’t exactly go as she expected. After her daughter had made a couple runs down a ramp, one of the “skater punks” at the park spotted her and approached, and her mother won’t ever forget what happened next.
When Jeanean Thomas and her young daughter went to the Churchill Park in Cambridge, Ontario, they found it to be full of teenage boys, who all looked like a bunch of hoodlums, reported FOX4KC. Thomas assumed they were mostly around 15 years old, and their age intimidated her already scared daughter even more, but something incredible happened not too long after they arrived.
The encounter actually caused Thomas to write a post about the incident on Twitter, and it’s since gone viral, but not for the reason it may seem. While some assume that “skater punks” are trouble makers and wouldn’t be accepting of a little girl in their “territory,” just the opposite.
In her open letter to the teen titled “Dear teenage boy at the skate park,” Thomas wrote:
You’re probably about 15 years old, so I don’t expect you to be very mature or for you to want a little girl on your skate ramp for that matter.
What you don’t know is that my daughter has been wanting to skateboard for months. I actually had to convince her that skateboarding wasn’t for just for boys.
So when we walked up to the skate park and saw that it was full of teenaged boys who were smoking and swearing, she immediately wanted to turn around and go home.
I secretly wanted to go too because I didn’t want to have to put on my mom voice and exchange words with you.
I also didn’t want my daughter to feel like she had to be scared of anyone, or that she wasn’t entitled to that skate park just as much as you were.
So when she said, “Mom it’s full of older boys,” I calmly said, “So what, they don’t own the skate park.”
She proceeded to go down the ramp in spite of you and your friends flying past her and grinding rails beside her.
She only had two or three runs in before you approached her and said “Hey, excuse me …”
I immediately prepared to deliver my “She’s allowed to use this park just as much as you guys” speech when I heard you say, “Your feet are wrong. Can I help you?”
You proceeded to spend almost an hour with my daughter showing her how to balance and steer, and she listened to you – a feat not attained by most adults.
You held her hand and helped her get up when she fell down and I even heard you tell her to stay away from the rails so that she wouldn’t get hurt.
I want you to know that I am proud that you are part of my community, and I want to thank you for being kind to my daughter, even though your friends made fun of you for it.
She left the skate park with a sense of pride and with the confidence that she can do anything, because of you.
Now do you see why it went viral? Apparently the boy’s parents did a great job raising him, and it shows in how he treated Thomas’s daughter.
The Cambridge Times ended up finding out who the anonymous stranger was, and he had a great reason for helping out a scared little girl. Ryan Carney is a regular at the park, and he said that when he saw the little girl having troubles, he just knew he had to do something. But on top of that, he knows the impact that random acts of kindness can have on people.
“When you put a smile on someone else’s face, it’s infectious,” he said. “If you do something nice for someone, something nice will happen to you.”
We often hear of stories about “paying it forward,” and usually when people do so, they see some sort of reward from it in the future. While Carney’s gesture may not be anything huge, for a scared little girl it meant the world, and it gave her the confidence to keep doing something.