Mom's Talk Q&A: Would You Let Your Child Own Snakes If It Was His or Her Passion?

Were you just the slightest bit disappointed when it turned out that the famous, soon-to-be-named Bronx Zoo Cobra (known as @BronxZoosCobra to his friends) was found? Not traipsing through New York, as his Twitter account claimed, but, as Bronx Zoo officials had predicted, right in the Reptile House? I was. It was fun while it lasted.

On the other hand, , I was relieved. It’s always so unsettling when one of the snakes gets out. Where could the damn thing be? And am I going to be the unlucky one who finds it?

Oh, wait a sec. Forgot to tell you something. My older brother, from an extremely young age, had a fascination not just with animals, but with reptiles. I’ll spare you the oft-repeated story of the time my brother, all of 5, “rescued” me, age 2, from a box turtle. But his interest eventually led to what, to many parents, would have been unthinkable: a house that not only housed five people, but about a dozen snakes – and at the menagerie’s peak, the dozens of rats and mice my brother bred to keep the gang fed.  We had a dog, too.

But reptiles were my brother’s passion – and so we all got used to it. When I tell this to people, many of them look at me askance, as if at night, we watched TV cuddling up with the family boa constrictor. That may have been true for my brother, but for the rest of us, no.

In fact, they all were in cages, in the basement, most of the time. Like the Bronx Zoo Cobra, on the rare occasion that a snake got out, it usually succeeded in hiding until my brother found it – although that would have been an impossible feat for Sheba, my brother’s 15 1/2 feet, 130-pound Burmese  python. Fortunately, she stayed obediently in her cage, before being sold to a Fort Myers, FL reptile broker in the mid-1980s, eventually landing a gig at the Riyadh Zoo. She used to travel by steamer trunk to the various speaking gigs my brother did back then.

And I should point out that, with one, literally small exception, none of my brother’s snakes were venomous. The venomous one was a baby copperhead that my brother and a friend found when a nearby housing development caused much of what might be called the indigenous population to be displaced. Why I was along for the capture, I don’t  recall. But driving home with my brother in the seat next to me – the teeny snake in a glass jar in his lap – terrified me. That one didn’t stay around long; it was a bridge too far for my parents.

However, as I’ve told snake stories over the years, I’ve come to realize something: for a lot of parents, having any snakes in the house would have been a bridge too far. For whatever reason, many people have an outsized fear of snakes, which is why a cobra on the, well, lamb held such fascination last week. But our parents – neither of whom are reptile enthusiasts – realized one of their children’s interests when they saw it – and let it flourish, despite the drawbacks. And, yes, my brother did go onto become a herpetologist.

As a parent, it makes me wonder just how far I’d go to pursue one of my children’s passions. If one of my kids pleaded to collect spiders, or started to pursue some esoteric sport that required hours of travel every week, would I do it? And how would I go about discerning their passions from their whims? Everyone of us, it seems, has a garage full of almost brand-new sports equipment, memories of brief forays into football or basketball that didn’t go anywhere.

So far, neither of our kids have put in front of us what might be called a “snake moment” – that moment when we have to decide if we’re willing to let a child pursue something that is going to involve no small amount of sacrifice that might involve the entire family – but I wonder what we’ll do when it does happens. Which leads to today’s question: how far have you gone to help your kids pursue their passions, or, conversely, when did you decide that enough is enough?