John Smart can hold his own on the mountain. He competed in the Olympic Winter Games in 1992 and 1994, placing fifth and seventh in moguls races. And so it’s with some amusement that he recalls the day he realized his sons were better skiers than him.

“I was thinking, ‘What year are my kids going to pass me?’ ” he said in a telephone interview. “It was age 11.”

Smart and his two boys were skiing Whistler, and his eldest, Luke, volunteered to lead them on a run through the terrain park, a series of sculpted ramps positioned in close succession that skiers and snowboarders use to launch themselves into the air.

As Smart watched his preteen son fly, he conceded that he was beat. “It was just the size of the jumps,” he explained. “They were jumping all of the big stuff and I was backing off.”

Some people might criticize Smart for allowing his children to take part in an activity that he didn’t feel was safe enough to engage in himself as an adult. After all, parents nowadays can find themselves in trouble for letting their children take a risk as mundane as walking to school unaccompanied.

Smart concedes he was nervous when Luke and his younger son, Ky, first started doing aerial tricks on skis. But that changed when he recognized they know what they are doing.

“Now that they’ve got the air sense, the acrobatics, and the stability, it’s enjoyable to watch them flying through the air,” he said.

There is hard data that suggests Smart’s got the right idea.

Mariana Brussoni calls it “competence-based decision-making” as opposed to “anxiety-based decision-making”, which, she explains, can have benefits for children that last a lifetime.

The developmental psychologist and UBC assistant professor of pediatrics was the lead author of a January 2015 aggregate study published in the International Journal of Environmental Research and Public Health that covered 21 papers on children and dangerous behaviour. Its findings: “The overall positive health effects of increased risky outdoor play provide greater benefit than the health effects associated with avoiding outdoor risky play.”

In a telephone interview, Brussoni told the Georgia Straight that most of the quantifiable data pertain to more routine activities such as climbing trees. But she said similar research has been applied to extreme sports. For example, Brussoni said, Norwegian researcher Ellen Sandseter found that groups predisposed to take risks, such as adolescents, benefit from extreme sports because those activities can fill a need for adrenaline that might otherwise manifest itself in the form of shoplifting or vandalism.

Smart, who is head coach at Momentum Ski Camps at Whistler Blackcomb, said that today there are more kids practising freestyle skiing and snowboarding at young ages, which means parents should get coaches involved earlier to ensure risks are taken with precautions.

“You’re not going to send them off an XL jump when they’re five, six, or seven,” he said. “It’s baby-stepping it.”

Leo Addington is head coach at Camp of Champions, another program offered at Whistler Blackcomb. He told the Straight the same story, estimating roughly 14 percent of campers are preteens, or “groms”, in snowboarder slang. He added that doesn’t necessarily mean that injuries are more common.

Addington reported that kids as young as six or seven years old are going off jumps and already doing tricks as complex as 360- and 540-degree rotations.

That’s introductory stuff by professional standards but definitely moves that can end with a bruised tailbone or broken wrist.

Inverted aerials come later, but similarly earlier than they used to. “I never put anybody upside down until they were about 10-ish,” Addington said.

He recalled that when he was a kid, there were no camps for freestyle skiing or snowboarding. The only way to learn was to watch a video and go off by yourself to try to emulate what the pros were doing in those movies.

Children enrolled at both Momentum and Camp of Champions have access to trampolines and foam pits before they hit jumps. Then, on the mountain, skiers and riders can launch off ramps and land on giant airbags. It’s only once they are comfortable with a new trick that they have to give it a try on the relatively hard snow.

“Now there is such a more scientific approach to it,” Addington said. “The risk is managed a lot better than it ever was.”