As soon as I had my first child, the childcare strategy was to have a nanny by the time I went back to work.
I was fortunate to have a year off with my first one and our first nanny started when little Miss Z was 9 months old.
We were lucky that we had that same nanny for the next 5 years, so she was with us throughout my second and third pregnancies. She left when my youngest was only a few months old as she too was becoming a mommy.
At the time I remember she told me she had learned a lot from me. I myself, learned mostly from books, as my experience with babies prior to being a Mom was nil.
And so fast forward a few more years and a couple of other nannies, and by the time my kids were 8, 6 and 4, after my divorce and my new partner coming into my life, I started getting these occasional hints “don’t you think they’re old enough to bathe by themselves?”, “how about they set the table?”, “miss Z could learn to do the vacuuming…”
I was in a privileged position in that I had a nanny taking care of the kids and the meals, and a cleaning lady taking care of the house… so I didn’t see the need at the time to “burden” the kids with such things.
But was that the right course of action? Throughout their early years I tried to instil a sense of independence – they dressed themselves, made their own beds, learned to fold and put away their clothes, etc… but somewhere along the way, I stopped teaching them, as their abilities progressed, other real life skills that were useful for their future, independent, lives.
And so there was a paradigm shift followed by some actions. We taught them to bathe by themselves (even little Miss A, who was 4 at the time), they started helping out with more chores like the laundry, setting the table, loading and unloading the dishwasher and more recently, as we don’t have a cleaning lady anymore, they’re working with us on the weekly house cleaning too.
Although they moan and groan about it, I know that this is the right path. We want to prepare our kids for real life. And sure, we hope that they are financially successful and able to afford all the luxuries, but even if they do and they hire people for certain jobs, they will appreciate those folks that much more, knowing how hard the work is.
On a visit to our first nanny, for one of her kid’s birthday parties, I remember noticing that her parents were doing every little thing for her kids… and she said she learned a lot from me!!
And this morning on the way to school, I saw a mom walking alongside her little girl and the mom was carrying the little girl’s school bag. I couldn’t help but think that a simple thing like that is the beginning of the slippery slope of “over-enablement”. Maybe we do it because of our own experiences growing up, maybe we just want to do everything for them when they’re little. The problem is that, unless you have someone external (like I did) calling you out, they will always be little in your eyes.
And one day you wake up, in your retirement, wanting to enjoy life, and you find yourself running around doing all sorts of things for your “grown-up” kids like house chores, paying bills, doctors’ appointments, bank loans, etc, because they never had to fend for themselves.
“Give them the fishing rod, not the fish” sums it up nicely… and as they grow up, the skills we give them should grow accordingly… not the size of the fish!
💛