shoes or wearing Dad’s hat. If Mom’s at the sink doing dishes, there they
are too, splashing around and getting totally soaked. If Dad’s under the
hood tinkering with the carburetor, there the kids are, lending their own
“helping” hand. Many parents get irritated and feel it’s a bother having
the kids underfoot. But what learning opportunities — at low price tags!
LOVE AND LOGIC TIP 8
What They See Is What They LearnI (Jim) spent my childhood on the wrong side of the tracks in a
trailer in industrial Denver. When my family scraped enough money
together, we bought a little garage to live in while my dad built a
house on the property.
Dad worked a morning shift downtown and rode the streetcar
to work, and then when he returned at 2:00 p.m. every day, he
picked up his hammer and saw and built a house. It took seven
years. As I watched him work, I thought, Wow! He gets to do all
the fun stuff: mix the concrete, lay the bricks, put on the
shingles, hammer nails, saw wood. I watched it all day, every
day.
At the end of the day, when my dad knocked off, he
invariably said, “Jim, clean up this mess.” So I would roll out
the wheelbarrow, pick up a shovel and a rake, and clean up the
mess. At the same time, Dad would explain to me that people
have to learn to clean up after themselves. They need to finish
and put the tools away.
When my dad noticed that I left my own stuff lying around,
he complained, “Why don’t you ever pick up your stuff, Jim?
There’s your bike on the sidewalk, and your tools are all over
the place. When you go to look for a tool, you won’t know
where it is.” I, of course, was learning all about cleaning up. I
was learning that adults don’t clean up after themselves.
Had my father modeled cleaning up after himself — saying