I’m hearing from friends that a lot of twenty-somethings have taken to either moving back to or remaining in the homes of parents. While it’s great to see the kids, seeing their laundry and dishes can get old after a decade. I was thinking about what we teachers could do to prevent this kind of nesting, even as children enter first grade. I came up with a few.
Part of the reason kids stay with parents is financial. We hear from these young adults that it’s too expensive to move out. Historically, it’s been good experience having to live in a studio apartment, sleeping with your feet touching the bathroom door. It calls on creativity to have to mold a couch out of a mattress and use only boxes, boards and posters for interior design. It’s also a money saver to live with other people. Start out with your friends and then when you’re all ready to sue one another, try some total strangers. Everyone should have to go to a refrigerator and find all their food gone. Everyone should have to listen to other people in the next room playing music or “entertaining”. It’s maturing to have deep, sunrise conversations about life, death, religion, politics and other big conversational topics we learn aren’t worth the fight.
So, they don’t have money. Fair enough. Tell them you’ll hire them and in place of room and board, they can work off their bills. Handymen and women are often called for jobs like simple repairs, shoveling, clearing junk out of basements, house cleaning and pet sitting. Parents, make a list of any jobs you need done around the house and the monetary value of service performed next to it. Leave a stack of “How To” books to cover every category. If young adults can read 100 text messages a minute, they can figure out a light fixture. If kids can speed read directions to complicated multi-faceted computer games, they can figure out how to get cat urine stains out of the Berber. One feels a little better about serving home made food to a member of a work force.
So…maybe we can instill some independence early in life with a few simple rules.
1. Don’t do for children what they can do for themselves. Sure, they may be wearing red flowers with pink stripes but who cares. He’ll learn from his peers what he should be picking out in the morning.
2. Let children work out their own squabbles. Ask a child what they should do if someone teases them and I’ll bet all the stuff on the floor of my car that they’ll say, “Tell a teacher.” When students come running to us let’s first ask them what they did when they were teased. How did they handle it? What could they have done? Teach them to stand up for themselves, change activities, ignore, or put up with jerks. That's how life is.
3. No more shoe tying, jacket zipping and scarf putting on-ing. Learning to protect yourself starts in line at recess.
4. Unless blood or bodily fluids are in evidence, no running to the school nurse. No placebo ice packs, no needless temperature taking, no drama. Learning how to soldier on will come in handy when they age and don’t want to use up all their sick days to be sick. Teach boys the phrase, “Man up!” early and say it often.
5. No more nap times. It’s too much like sleeping at mom and dad’s house. Children can learn to work sleep deprived like the rest of us.
6. No wiping up after them. No rubbing food stains out of shirts, cleaning around mouths or scraping mud off the lime green Crocks. That is just planting the thought seed that if they stand, look helpless and wait, they will be cleaned.
If we start now, we will raise a generation of young people who could live in a school locker, furnish an apartment with macaroni, glue and spray paint and end their days with Ramen prepared in one of a hundred ways. If your child is over the age of 6, it may be too late. The damage may have already been done, and to you I say for now and forever,
better leave the light on.
