Recently I was listening to a radio broadcast on ridding your home of youth entitlement. I was greatly challenged by a mother's experiment in changing the way she parented in order to help her children thrive first at home and then eventually as the enter the world of adulthood.
With my children being 5, 4, 2, and 2 months, it can be extremely overwhelming for me to even think about letting my kids "help me" in the kitchen or around the house. Most of the time, it means, more time and more mess---neither of which I have time for. However, this broadcast and a recent observation left me attentive to the needs of my children for encouragement as they grow and grace in allowing them to learn through mistakes.
While staying at our mission guesthouse, I was working in the kitchen with another mom who was baking peanut butter bars. Living in Paraguay makes treats like this extra special, particularly when the peanut butter was brought all the way from the USA. As she worked with her nine-year-old daughter, she stepped away to melt some chocolate, leaving her daughter to spread the bars in the baking dish. While pushing the bars down, the glass dish slowly approached the edge of the counter without her noticing. Then with a terrible crash, the dish fell off the counter shattering into a thousand pieces across the kitchen floor. Without a word of disdain or raising of her voice in anger, her mother quickly rushed to her daughter's side to make sure she was alright. She then assured her that it was an accident and that she was not angry about the broken dish or lost peanut butter bars that were now filled with shards of glass.
Her daughter, feeling completely miserable at her failure, sat in the other room while the glass was cleaned up. However, once the kitchen was swept and mopped, her mother approached her with the proposition of trying again. Her daughter agreed so they went to the store, bought new ingredients and began again.
While they worked, this mother asked me in front of her daughter, "How many times have you broken a dish when cooking, Rebekah?" At that moment, I laughed at the realization that my many mistakes and recipes gone drastically wrong, have played a huge part in my learning how to cook. After killing the yeast in my Cardamon bread one year, I delivered the flat braided loaves as Christmas gifts for my college professors anyway. Needless to say, I am a lot more careful about the temperature of my liquid now when working with yeast. Or the time when I cooked egg bake with the plastic wrap still on top...lets just say we enjoyed the meal, plastic and all.
There are many more stories of mistakes I've made in the kitchen, but I realized that a gracious response to my children's effort to help is crucial to their character development. They need confidence to try new things without fear of getting blasted with anger or disappointment in the result of their efforts.
Desiring to encourage this mom during the stressful event, I told her how impressed I was with her response to such a frustrating circumstance. She responded regretfully, "there's a reason only my youngest daughter will still cook with me." I appreciated her openness and vulnerability in encouraging me in my own journey of motherhood.
Children learn by doing, and if I want to develop in them a heart for serving others and working hard, I must not stifle their eagerness but rather, guide and assist them as they learn. This is especially difficult for me, since I am driven by making my life as perfectly organized as possible and planning how each minute of my day will go. Though this type of perfectionism sometimes seems like the ideal way of life, I realize that if I continue to pursue it I will miss out on the joy and richness found in training my little ones.
