The grind that binds: For one family, skateboarding offers a chance for bonding and life lessons

Daily Press (Newport News, Va.) (MCT) - For the Birdsong family, life doesn't center on the baseball diamond or ballet class.

Instead, the soundtrack of their afternoons is provided by the rattle and clack of urethane wheels on well-worn fiberboard.

They're skateboarders.

For them, skating is one of the ties that bind.

"I don't know much about football and basketball, but I can teach them about this," said 37-year-old McLemore Birdsong, a Suffolk, Va., resident who regularly skates with his two kids at Mike's Surf Shop indoor skate park in Hampton.

"It's good exercise _ and it's exercise without a team. But I don't push them. If they want to stop tomorrow, I'm OK."

There's no sign of that.

His daughter Harper, 10, is an enthusiastic, confident skater who navigates the bowl at Mike's with grace. Her younger brother _ 7-year-old Miles _ isn't too far behind her. You'll find him happily swaying back and forth on the park's mini half-pipe. He's not yet fine-tuned his skills at the level of his dad or sister, but he's working on it.

"I usually hurt myself at least once," Miles said, smiling. "One time I smashed into someone and both of us flew off our boards."

Miles has been skating for about six months. His sister, for about 18 months. So far, the Birdsongs have sustained no major injuries. Aches and pains? Yes. Bruised pride? Probably.

"But everyone's stayed in one piece," the father said. It helps that all three skate with a full array of protective gear: knee pads, elbow pads, wrist pads and helmet.

Amy Birdsong, the mother of the family, doesn't skateboard, but she's often there to praise every new skill or trick, be it a grind, kick turn, rock fakie, drop in or transfer.

"This is their thing with their dad," she said, as she watched the action through a window. "I read with them. Dad does the skateboarding. My husband is a surfer. He can do this when there are no waves, he can do this with the kids.

"I think we're going to be doing this for a long time."

Mike Monteith, owner and namesake of Mike's Surf Shop, said the Birdsongs are unusual for the area. "We see a handful of dad-son combinations, but it's very rare that we see a son, a father and a daughter," he said. "It's far from an everyday event."

There's reason to think that the Birdsongs may be at the leading edge of a trend.

"We're seeing much more of this at municipal skate parks," said Miki Vuckovich, executive director of the Tony Hawk Foundation, based in Vista, Calif. The foundation supports the creation of public skate parks in low-income communities across the nation.

"People in their 30s or 40s, many of them grew up skateboarding, and many of them are bringing their kids. We've had to adjust our strategy," he said. "Rather than presenting skateboarding as a youth-oriented activity, we're showing that it's a family activity."

He said a generation of skaters who came to the sport during an explosion of its popularity in the 1980s still consider skateboarding a lifestyle, not a hobby. "Young people today are being introduced to it as readily as soccer or baseball," Vuckovich said. "It's become part of the mainstream. Today, we have parents, business owners, city council members who are skateboarders. As a result, more skateboard parks are being built."

He cited statistics saying that 65 public skate parks existed in the United States in 1996. Today, there are around 2,500.

While skateboarding has been absorbed into the mainstream, it still offers kids a measure of danger and at least a whiff of rebelliousness. "It's cool and it's not dorky to them," Amy Birdsong said. "We like independent things, individual sports. And they're not sitting there working their thumbs," she said, imitating the action of playing a video game. "We don't want laziness."

After a recent skating session at Mike's, Harper and Miles took off their pads and got ready to head for the car and home. Dad took a moment to give Miles some encouragement. "How's your hip?" he asked. "Good," Miles answered.

"You looked really good out there today," the father said. "That last little thing on the half-pipe was tip-top."

Life lessons can be taught with skateboards, Birdsong's pep talk suggests.

"Everybody has to try one new thing each time out," he said, talking to his kids. "You don't have to succeed. You just have to try."

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© 2008, Daily Press (Newport News, Va.).