Without realizing how stupid it is!
Have you ever heard someone say in a huffy tone "It's easier to just do it myself!" I know I have. From my grandmother, my mother, and occasionally from my father.
It never really occurred to me that the phrase was amiss with the role of parenting until just recently. I know that when my relatives said these things they were frustrated, tired, and sometimes desperate to get their task completed. What they didn't realize; however, was the enormous cost of failing to do the the "other" task at hand. The task of teaching. For those of you who claim to be christian, it would be failing in God's command to "Raise your children in the paths they should go."
You see, it is MUCH easier to do the task yourself and move on to the next item on the list. It isn't easy to teach a child how to do something as simple as setting a table, sweep floors, take out trash, do dishes, do laundry, make scrambled eggs, hammer a nail, wash a car, or any of a hundred different tasks that in our hustle and bustle of what has become our everyday life we just do.
Meanwhile, you shoo the kids to sit in front of the computer or TV without any supervision from or connection with you. So there the kid sits, lonely, depressed, and bored. They know they are incompetent and useless because you just told them so. They don't feel like they belong to the family and they don't have anything to do. Here is the first step we make in developing a child destined to be a drug user, a gangster, and more terrifying yet, a bad parent.
I am frequently guilty of this myself. Realizing that you are making a mistake is the first step to correction. Family life has been slowly deteriorating in our nation since Thomas Jefferson decided that parents were incompetent teachers and instituted public education. Think about this carefully and over several days and weeks before making a response here.
Parents and grandparents have been the primary teachers since the beginning. In fact, it was the primary task. In communities, as children became competent in the household duties, they would then spend time with adults who were the best at something else they were interested in. This could be weaponry, herbalism, pottery, hunting, or any skill that suited them. The children themselves would be able to wander freely from task to task observing, trying their hand at this or that, developing skills, knowledge, a sense of belonging and of self-esteem.
With time, a child would find a developing interest in learning more certain key skills and would start acquiring their own tools and improving their skills in that particular activity until such time the entire community recognized them as the "Go To" person for a particular product or service.
Today, parents can't even expect to take care of a sick child because they have to go to work. The child, coughing, vomiting, feverish, is trotted to school, dumped off, and the parent goes to work to make the money needed to pay the bills. Meanwhile, the child is spreading the sickness and truth to tell, the parent is probably sick as well and spreading illness to customers and co-workers. Don't you think this is just a little bit on the nutty side? Isn't there something wrong here?
With all our supposedly great technology, is it really worth it?
I'm finished with my writing, I'm going to go outside now and pick beans. Not all the beans, just the ones that are "fat" and the pods have become inedible. I'll lay them out to dry so that we will have dried beans for the winter and seed for next summer. I'll teach my sons how to chose which beans to pick and which beans to lay aside for seed. I'll try to be patient with them as they make mistakes. I'll repeat myself many times both in words and in actions. I'll recognize the incredible blessing I have to be able to spend all my time with my sons and the treasure they are. Social security? I assure you, REAL social security is in our children. Not the government and not the banks.
Realizing this makes me TRULY THANKFUL!
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