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Today's
quotation:
Chances are that any helpful two-year-old will break some eggs. We
are
often not very good at things when we are new. But there may be an
important
choice to make at such moments. Do we support and protect the
innate wish
to be of help to others in our children, or do we protect the
eggs? Hard as it
seems, the greater mother wisdom may lie in a willingness to clean up
broken
eggs or replace a mitten and a box of crayons.
Rachel Naomi Remen
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Today's
Meditation:
I really do
love to see parents who are patient with their children,
and who allow them to make mistakes and do things wrong so
that they'll learn on their own. If a child wants to
help me with something, my first thought is usually that
it's going to end up taking longer, but isn't it worth
it? Far too often we're more interested in no eggs
being broken than we are in helping children to learn
things that are important to learn.
Of course, if the recipe calls for six eggs and you have
only six, you may need to supervise a little more closely,
but that's usually the extreme situation.
Rachel
is right on when she says that the greater wisdom may lie
in cleaning up a broken egg or two. Children who
want to be helpful are a blessing, and the sooner we can
help them to learn what helpfulness entails-- and the very
positive feelings that result from helping others-- the
sooner the children will grow up to be human beings who
are willing to contribute to the world in many helpful
ways.
Our
children need us to help them to grow, not to control them
and try to prevent every sort of accident. They need
us to push them sometimes, help them sometimes, and love
and encourage them always. We have a huge influence
on the children in our lives, and it's important that we
be adults who help them to learn and to grow rather than
adults who only try to control and manipulate. We
can help them to think for themselves and act on their
own, but it takes some effort on our part to let go of the
need to control.
While
broken eggs are a pain to clean up, the effort is worth it
if a very young person has been given a chance to do
something new, a chance to learn a new skill or idea, and
a chance to understand what it means to help someone else.
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