After writing earlier articles about how much I’ve been consciously trying to allow my daughter to help around the house, and to allow her to contribute – even when we’re nervous about the “help” she may provide, the strategy is obviously paying off. As you can see from the video above, even though she’s just turned two, she’s got a serious “helpful” streak in her.
In the video above, I actually had just stepped away from the dinner table – where I had been sitting in front of my 8-month-old son, giving him his dinner. Not 20 seconds later, I turn around, and my daughter is there, sitting on my seat, pleasantly and patiently feeding her brother his dinner, chatting to him all the way about how “yummy it is.”
She’s TWO.
Last weekend, she shocked me when – after getting back from a fantastic wedding on the Chesapeake, I had a mountain of clothes to fold & put away. My daughter, seeing a pile of folded PJs, asked me if those were PJs and if they had to get put away. I told her they did, and that they go in the PJ drawer. She then grabbed the massive stack, and ambled away to her room. I heard a thunk as the drawer opens & closes, and she comes back for more. After proceeding to put away her underpants, socks, her brother’s socks, and her shorts, she said, PPHINISHED! and went off to go play, leaving me dumbstruck that a two year old was just helping me with chores. Like really helping.
It all just ratifies, for me, the following datum from the Successfully Raising Children course:
Children, in the main, are quite willing to work. A two-, three-, four-year-old child is usually found haunting his father or her mother trying to help out either with tools or dust rags; and the kind parent who is really fond of the children responds in the reasonable and long-ago-normal manner of being patient enough to let the child actually assist. A child so permitted then develops the idea that his presence and activity is desired and he quite calmly sets about a career of accomplishment. — L. Ron Hubbard
So much for “terrible twos” eh? I only hope it continues to be this terrible!