Children Helping

I have vivid childhood memories of sitting on the damp concrete steps leading down to the kitchen door with a paper bag full of peas, lima beans or corn and a metal bowl.  It was my job to husk the corn or shell the peas or beans.  I remember learning to break the backs of the pods and scrape out the peas, along with the satisfaction of the perfect split of the pod and anticipation of the size and number of peas hiding inside.  Peas were fun (in the scheme of things -- being a child I didn't like these chores), but lima beans were really hard.  Even as I child, I loved lima beans, so it wasn't about the vegetable, but about how difficult it is to get lima beans out of their tough shells.  They don't break open neatly like peas.  I also learned how to iron a pillow case when I was six, was expected to make my bed every day, set the table, even sometimes help with dusting, weeding, washing the car, mowing the lawn, or sweeping the terrace.  I imagine these expectations were pretty typical for children in my baby boomer generation.  But they are not what we expect of our child and, while there are some parents whose resolve I admire enormously, I don't think that my husband and I are unusual in our relative lack of expectations.

There are a lot of reasons for this.  At least in my household, we have a wonderful woman who cleans and does laundry, relieving us family members of duties that my mother primarily, with some help from my siblings and me, performed.  It's also because as parents we have less time and patience for enforcing unpleasant responsibilities.  And I should be very clear -- I did not like doing chores and like any normal kid I resisted, procrastinated, employed avoidance tactics, so while I may have nostalgic recollections of shelling peas, I was none too happy at the time.

Over the last eighteen months or so, I have decided that we need to demand more from our now 15 year-old son in the chore domain.  I'm sure you'll say this is a little late to get started, but it's still better than never.  He has always had to set the table for dinner, but there is much more he could do.  It would be good for him -- he would learn how to do things that would be useful to him and helpful to me.  Plus there's the possibility that he could feel accomplished.

So several weeks ago, I was making pesto.  I love pesto, but pinching all those leaves off the stems can only be described as tedious.  Suddenly, I thought, my son loves pesto, too, so why doesn't he come help me.  He did so reluctantly, but we got through the process much faster and had time to chat while we worked.  It was a much pleasanter experience that working alone.  While he wouldn't admit it, I would like to believe that when he ate the pesto (which he puts on everything imaginable from pasta to hamburgers to sandwiches), that felt a small sense of satisfaction.

As my campaign has progressed, he has gotten to be a reasonably good dishwasher which means his father and I can relax a little after dinner.   He even took laundry off the line and folded it quite well the other day, saving it from an afternoon squall.  Now, if I can only get him to pick his clothes up off the floor. . . .