Hooray – my kitchen sink is finally fixed!!! It’s been a problem for a week now, something was wrong with the garbage disposale and dh wasn’t home long enough to fix it before the weekend. Yesterday morning he took the entire thing apart, but didn’t have time to put it together before he had to go to work. Do you know how fun washing dishes in a plastic box only about 1.5 times bigger than a shoebox is (because that was all I had to use in place of a dishpan)? It was really a huge effort to get the dishes done, since it meant going back and forth every few minutes to dump out the dirty water, rinsing the washed dishes, then back to dump the water again. It really makes me think about how easy we have it nowadays, and appreciate a tiny bit how much harder our ancestors had to work than we do.
To continue with the examples I promised yesterday on older kids, here you are!
I began teaching my kids to cook (at the stove) when they were 5 – 7. A friend once told me she didn’t feel it was safe for her daughter to learn to cook (at the time she was 8 yrs. old and it came up because she cooked with my girls when she came to visit, and was so excited and kept saying she couldn’t believe she was really cooking something). I suggested that instead of just refusing to allow her daughter access to the kitchen because of her concerns, she address the issue directly and show her daughter how to be safe when cooking (for example, her daughter had long hair, so she could have shown her how to pull her hair up so it wouldn’t be a fire hazaard, and initially stayed with her while she cooked).
My oldest son (he’ll be 14 tomorrow :)) has independently done a huge amount of work to finish our attic. His ability to do this didn’t happen overnight and didn’t magically appear out of nowhere. I initially worked with him and showed him how to hang drywall, dh showed him how to use power tools. As he got more and more comfortable with the skills necessary, I gave him more leeway. Now he goes up to the attic when he has time and desire and does whatever he does, and I just go admire all of his work at the end of the day. This could never happen if I didn’t help him learn to be capable and safe early on in the process, and trust he was inherently competent.
Kids have an innate need to explore their environment and it’s stifling and unhealthy to make things forbidden. Sometimes as parents it’s easier (in the short term) to just say ‘no’ instead of taking the time to teach them to do what they want to do safely. But in the long run, it’s detrimental and just makes life harder for both the child and parents.
Avivah
