Kids on Motorbikes Made My American Alarm Bells Go Off

In Bali, I realized how much of my “safety” reflex is inherited fear.

🎧 Beyond the paywall: this essay includes recorded audio/video and a narrated version by me.

I saw two kids on a motorbike in Ubud. Neither looked older than 11. No helmets. One driving, the other holding on behind. They zipped past my car, confident, laughing, like this was the most natural thing in the world.

My first thought. Where are their parents? My second thought came automatically. Someone in the U.S. would call CPS.

I saw it again that day. And the next. Kids everywhere on motorbikes. Alone sometimes. Sometimes with a friend on the back. They’d pull up to warungs for snacks, park outside shops, weave through the narrow streets of Ubud like they’d been doing this their whole lives. Because they had.

I asked Agus, my driver, why I kept seeing this. I told him that when I was that age, we had bicycles. Not motorbikes. I laughed. He didn’t.

His English wasn’t quite good enough to explain what he wanted to say, so I asked him to speak in Indonesian. I recorded him while we drove: