Haven't said much this last week because I've been pretty busy with the weather-related stuff as well as work. I was reminded of how much I hated shoveling snow as a kid, when my dad would say we'd better have the driveway clear by the time he got home from work. Of course, Oklahoma's winters are far better in this regard than Ohio's, so I think my kids will be safe.
And this of course makes me want to think of other ways to toughen them up. I ran across the following video in my internet travels, and I thought it was very well done.
The author makes a compelling, if somewhat crude, point: kids need to be shown their inner toughness. I know of some people with kids in their 20's and 30's (and older) who still do everything for them, as though the children are still 9 or 10.
This brings me to an interesting dilemma... on the one hand, I'm going to be adopting kids, most likely out of a foster home, and most likely ones who have seen some tragedy in their short lives, whether from abuse or loss or whatever. On the other hand, I believe that parents have a responsibility to prepare their kids for adulthood: to prepare them to take complete responsibility for themselves and their own well-being. I think there's going to be a difficult challenge ahead of me, attempting to balance the nurturing that the kids will require with the hard lessons that must come in order to prepare kids for adulthood.
I have friends whose children are well into their teenage years, and these kids can't even begin to imagine cooking a meal for themselves or washing their own clothes. I share some of that... my parents never wanted me in the kitchen except to wash the dishes. My cooking skills were nonexistent when I left home, and if it weren't for my jobs at fast food restaurants I probably would have starved to death.
On the other hand, I started washing my own clothes as soon as I was old enough to drive. My parents didn't want me wrecking their washer & dryer, so they sent me to the laundromat. It boggles my mind that there are kids who don't know how to perform this simple task -- I still wash my own clothes today, and I've been married almost 18 years.
There are other things... what good is a teenager who can't mow the lawn? One guy told me he didn't have his kid do it because his kid didn't do it right, so he just does it himself. I can't understand the mentality that says it's somehow better to skip a teachable moment in the interests of just getting the thing done -- we're not talking about just a particular Saturday, we're talking about All Summer Long. In my mind, this is child abuse.
Kids need to be prepared for adulthood. There also needs to be room for them to be kids. I see it as a spectrum, from 0% responsibility at infancy to 100% responsibility at the time they leave home (ideally at or around 18 years of age). So when I encounter a 14-year-old who's only about 20% responsible for himself, it depresses me just as much as when I meet a similar 14-year-old who's had to become the parent of their younger siblings.
I don't begrudge kids their "useless plastic toys" or "stupid video games", as some folks do. I remember thinking that my Star Wars action figures were the most important things in the world, and I think it's better to let a kid grow out of that and develop other interests than to constantly berate them for not having more adult values. I think that will come naturally, perhaps at different speeds for different kids, as they become more and more responsible for themselves, and that's why parents need to work at getting the kids to be more and more responsible as they grow older.
Anyway, these are the sorts of things I think about when I think about what it means to be a dad.
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