Give Your Kids Responsibilities
Children grow up and leave home. They go from helpless
babies to mature adults who have sex and drink beer while
your back is turned. The secret is to try and keep pace with
them. As they grow, you have to back off more and let them do
more. You have to resist the urge to do everything for them
and let them fry eggs* or paint dustbins** for themselves.
It’s a delicate balancing act. You can’t give kids more responsi-
bility than they can handle, but at the same time you can’t
hold them back. And when you do let them fry eggs or paint
dustbins for the first time, they are going to make a mess—
yolk on the stove, paint on the garage floor. It’s the mess most
often that makes a parent say, “No, you can’t.” But we have to
break a few eggs (ha ha) to be able to fry one. We have to
gloop a bit of paint if kids are going to be able to carry out any
DIY job for themselves when they are grown up.
When kids are tiny and learning to drink from a cup for the
first time we expect spillage. We stand there with a paper
towel in our hand prepared to mop up. But by the time they
are teenagers, we’ve forgotten the art of hiding the paper towel
- This one comes from my own son who, when he was asked what being a
grown-up meant, said it was being able to fry eggs as he wasn’t allowed to—
he was about 8 at the time. I felt so mean I got him cooking breakfast every
day for a month until he was sick of frying eggs.
**This came from a friend who was always angry with his father. When I
asked him about his relationship, he complained that as a kid he was never
allowed to do anything to help. He finally lost it with his father when his
father was painting a dustbin and the kid wanted to help and his father
said, “No.” But why? It wouldn’t have hurt. Why the father was painting a
dustbin in the first place remains a mystery.