“Will we be on time?” Boy Two glances anxiously at the car click. It’s the weekend and we are driving to a snowboarding lesson.
Instead of a calm reassurance, the poor boy gets a bit of a rant and then a lecture.
The thing is – he knows when we’ve to be there and how long it takes. Therefore, he shouldn’t need to ask. Harsh? Maybe, but that’s what the lecture explained.
My job as a mum is to equip my kids to navigate their lives without me. A very long-term handover exercise, if you like.
Sure, when they were tiny it was my job to keep them alive and undamaged, but only til they were big enough to do it themselves. It’s not that I don’t care about that – on the contrary. It’s just that there’s no point in me organising and fixing everything all the time.
They must learn to do it on their own.
Here’s their curriculum:
- Planning
- Research
- Budgeting
- Self-care
- Care of others
- Motivation
- Good thinking
- Problem solving
- Domestic skills
What’s not my job:
- Entertaining them
- Fighting their battles
- Fixing everything
- Cleaning up after them (over and above what I need for my sanity)
Today’s question:
On the domestic skills front, how young is too young to clean a toilet?
I’m asking because we have three loos and there are three boys, I’m considering making each responsible for the cleanliness of one thereby steepening the learning curve about dribble on the seat and skid marks in the pan.
What do you think?
Definitely! It’s the perfect “it’s crap but it only takes two minutes” job and not procrastinating small tasks is an important lesson to learn (says she, procrastinating about 27 tasks by typing this). I’m not good on what kids can do at particular ages but I bet my seven year old nephew could clean a toilet.
I’m pretty sure that anyone who can ‘do’ Minecraft could manage loo cleaning.