I don’t do crafts.
I don’t prepare school snacks.
I don’t fold my kids’ clothes.
All the lovely crafts on Pinterest, the creative snack possibilities, and the sideways glances when my kids showed up in wrinkled clothes used to make me feel guilty for not doing these things. How easily I judged the quality of my parenting by comparing to strangers instead of by looking at my own family and our uniqueness.
And the more I thought about it, the more confident I became about my parenting style. I now think the fact that I don’t do these things is great for my kids. Here’s why:
Glue, popsicle sticks, construction paper make me dizzy. Glitter. Please, no glitter. No to googly eyes and no to paper clippings all over the floor and no to tangled yarn in a basket.
Don’t get me wrong, my kids do crafts and I even keep some of them. I just don’t do crafts with my kids. Little kids can’t really do a craft themselves, so mom ends up doing it and that makes me crabby. Let’s go outside and swing instead. Or dig for worms or bake Christmas cookies or read or turn on the music real loud and dance.
Bigger kids who can do the craft alone should do the craft alone so they can gain confidence and step outside my limited creative expressions.
I love sending my kids down into the world of design and ideas and tactile objects and color and I enjoy seeing what they build down there. I just don’t want to go down with them. I’m afraid my personal aversion to crafts will influence them, turn them off from the possibilities of their own creative talents.
When I don’t hover, they come up with fresh ideas totally uninfluenced by mom. I step away from the crafts. I give them space. They are free from my resentment and able to roam the wilds of discovery and design.
Our school in Djibouti in the Horn of Africa doesn’t do lunch, so the kids are home by one o’clock. But they have two snack breaks in the morning and I don’t prepare my kids’ school snacks for them.
My youngest daughter prepares her own snack. Mostly because I forget to do it and have forgotten so many times that she stepped up. As she stepped up, I stopped worrying that she would starve because of a forgetful mother. I also stopped worrying that she would eat candy all morning.
She has learned what she needs to fuel herself at school. She knows a piece of chocolate will melt in our 100-degree heat, that one slice of cheese won’t sustain her through math class, that a banana not inside a box will get smushed in her backpack. She asks questions about nutrition and thoughtfully weighs flavor versus convenience.
She plans ahead and makes reasonable choices and feels a sense of pride that she can take care of herself in this way.
I spent years folding clothes for my kids only to find them, still clean, balled up in drawers or on the floor or in the back of a closet. Unworn and hopelessly wrinkled. For a while, I refolded these items, until I realized that I only found them, again, balled up in drawers or on the floor or in the back of the closet.
So I quit folding. I place a pile of clean clothes on the bed. The kids do with these clothes as they please. And if they please to let them get wrinkled, I say nothing about the wrinkled dress shirt they wear to church on Sunday or to the school band concert. Not my problem.
Let the kids make their own school snack choices. Let the kids wear a wrinkled shirt, makes no difference to me. They are learning about the world, about how they choose to fit in it. They are learning responsibility and creativity and consequences. They constantly surprise me with their ability to think and behave not like me but fully like themselves.
Something else unexpected came from my parenting gaps – my kids are more likely to clean up a craft when they did it on their own. They are more likely to keep clothes folded if they folded them on their own. Not every time or I’d be singing the Hallelujah Chorus, but often enough that they inadvertently picked up another skill. They are more likely to eat good food if they pack it themselves and less likely to whine for junk. They decided, mom didn’t force it.
Let the kids play with (washable) finger paint. And smear it all over their faces and maybe the table or walls. I’ll be curled up on the couch reading The New Yorker or drafting an essay or eating Christmas cookies. No worries they’ll I’ll clean it up later.