Parental Rant #4: Thoughts From a Small, Homemade Soapbox

Commercials like this one get me a'thinkin': environmentally unfriendly in a blatant, people-before-the-planet kind of way (the blogger above says it best: "Screw my kids! I want to spend time with my kids!") but also reminiscent of the very modern trend of outsourcing ALL undesirable household tasks, and some of the nice ones. Homework help, regularly delivered "homemade" meals, yard freshening in spring, even a possible trend toward entire planting and harvesting of gardens, according to the papers.

The greatest gift you can give a kid today, said the late George Carlin, is a three-hour block to do nothing.

I would add one other thing: The greatest gift you can give a kid today is a chore. To follow on the heels of that free time.

A Pennsylvanian farmer, when he came across speedwalking columnist Anna Quindlen, told her, "You wouldn't need to do that if you put in an honest day's work."

Maybe I've been getting a little too much parenting inspiration from "Little House on the Prairie." (More thoughts on that later.)

I appreciate individual efforts to follow our bliss and get more time in the day, but we are letting too many capabilities get away permanently. And if they get away from us, our children never have a chance to learn how to master them: to cook a meal themselves, create something from wood, how to paint their own fingernails, how to complete a task they didn't enjoy, but feel grudgingly good about completing. By doing so, you teach them that they have true choices about how to spend their money. And I recognize the balance: I come from a family that does nearly everything themselves, even when it makes more sense to take the car for an oil change down the block.

I'm not saying bake your bread from scratch each day. I'm saying bake once in a while when the mood strikes, and be darned sure that your kids are involved in it so at a later date they have some rough recall. Do them the favor of expanding their skills so they can offer those skills to a significant other, and to the world, one day. They may still choose to pay someone else to do it, but at least they had a choice.

When my grandfather met his current wife, he told my mother, "She's a worker." It was the greatest compliment he could give, growing up in the Great Depression. It was a sign that they would work together, side by side, to create something worth being proud of.