[2021-03-22] Helpful kids
The first thing I learned to bake was tea biscuits. I asked my mom to teach me to bake, and she picked the easiest recipe in her well-loved cookbook.
My mom was good at teaching me things and letting me figure out other things on my own. Perhaps that came from her own experience growing up on a farm. As a kid, her chores included transferring wood from the shed to the kitchen, carrying water from the pump to the house, gathering eggs from the hens, and fetching soft water from the rain barrel in summer and snow in winter to be melted to wash clothes. It's hard to imagine her getting much more than cursory direction on how to do any of these tasks. In fact, my mom's older sister allowed her to knit only when my mom demonstrated that she already knew how; my aunt then got my mom her own knitting needles and yarn.
My siblings and I also had chores when we were growing up. Daily ones, such as tending to the animals, doing dishes and sweeping the floor, and seasonal ones, such as collecting buckets of sap, picking stones and weeding the garden. It's true what they say: a farmer's work is never done. So helping around the house and on the farm was a given. Whatever job we kids did—even if imperfect—was better than a task that would otherwise have gone undone.
My mom's experience of growing up on a farm in the 1940s and parenting kids on a farm in the 1970s is nothing like my experience of parenting kids in the city in the 1990s. For me, there was no farm, no garden, no massive lawn to mow, no need to hang laundry on a clothesline. With my husband working in the home, daily chores such as buying groceries, cooking food and doing dishes were taken care of. On weekends, I helped with weekly duties such as laundry, cleaning and baking. This reality, plus advances in automation, meant there was little that our kids' needed to do. It often felt easier to do household tasks ourselves than to teach our children to do a job, which would inevitably create more work for us, at least initially.
I thought about these differences when I read the article Are We Raising Unhelpful, Bossy Kids? Here's The Fix. Science writer Michaeleen Doucleff, who wrote the article based on her book Hunt, Gather, Parent: What Ancient Cultures Can Teach Us About the Lost Art of Raising Happy, Helpful Little Humans, found that many moms don't let their young children help around the house. She quotes psychologist Lucia Alcala, who explains the rationale:
"What they say is that, 'I know she's not going to do a competent job, and she's going to create more work for me,'" Alcala says. "So the parents exclude the child from helping because they're not competent yet."
Doucleff adds:
If parents purposefully do chores while the child is not there, tell the child to go play or watch TV, or overly manage the activity with many instructions and corrections, young children lose interest—not just in the chores but in helping their parents. At the same time, kids miss out on opportunities to learn how to collaborate and work together with their siblings and parents.
Doucleff notes that parents and older siblings have significant influence over the willingness of kids to help around the house. The act of shooing kids away or excluding them from helping may erode a child's motivation to contribute, she adds.
As a self-confessed perfectionist, I wondered how much I had done this very thing with my kids. I concluded that I fell somewhere in the middle between discourager and encourager. For example, though I often bake with my daughter, I sometimes need to distract myself if I feel impatient or my daughter takes an approach that differs from mine.
Other tasks were much easier to relinquish to my kids, such as laundry (we each do our own), cleaning bedrooms and washing bathrooms—perhaps because my perfectionist tendencies are more likely to come out in the kitchen. As the kids got older, activities they used to help me with, such as doing dishes, became their jobs and if we did them together, I was helping them, not the other way around.
Through her research, Doucleff found that in cultures where parents welcome young children to participate in family chores and work, even if the child's efforts will be messier and slower than the parents' approach, kids are more likely to be helpful. Of note, the jobs assigned are tiny subtasks of what the parents are already doing, such as fetching a spoon to help the parent who is cooking. A key feature of the subtasks is that they are real functions that are genuinely useful.
Doucleff points out:
How you respond to a very young child who shows interest in helping is key to whether that child grows into a 12-year-old who wants to help around the house or (and this will sound familiar to many of us) a kid who rolls their eyes when you ask.
By that definition, maybe I didn't do such a bad job after all. My kids are always willing to contribute and never roll their eyes when asked to help.
As for the tea biscuits I made when I was a little girl, I don't remember how they turned out, but I do know that I became a life-long baker.
