Tuesday, July 21, 2009

Ant or Grasshopper?

There are some people who are hard workers, who take action and do things. Then there are others that know how to get others to do their work. The former are admired and hard work is seen as a virtue that we must attempt to instill in our children. And yet I feel that it is the latter group that has an easier life and the hard workers suffer under drudgery. I know a housewife with two part-time maids, whose full-time working spouse seems to be doing a lot of household chores and yet from their conversations you would feel that she has a huge workload and her husband is happy to help her out in every way he can. I especially want to point out that why I am even giving this any thought is because all this happens in a very sweet and charming way, with no party feeling used or burdened. I am not sure if this knack of charming others to do your work is a cultivated skill or if it is a sheer stroke of luck that she has a hard-working partner. In any case I am intrigued.

This isn’t the grasshopper of the fables we are talking about, one who lazed around and starved in the winter, but a grasshopper who played through the summer while the ant happily filled up the winter stores for the both of them. I am really wondering if I shouldn’t be teaching my kids this skill instead of self-sufficiency and hard work. Damsels-in-distress types seem to have it much easier in life, no?

Thursday, July 9, 2009

Good and Great, and knowing the difference therein

As summer vacation rolls along friends have been sharing pictures of the past school year – preschool graduation, Kindergarten graduation, 5th grade graduation and so on. I have a continued sense of unease with such ceremonies.

It used to be that graduation was a special event marking the point in your life where you are finally on your own, with some accumulated skill and a degree to help you get a job, a symbolic leaving of the nest marking transition to adulthood and hence an event worth celebrating. Bigwigs come to lecture you about their wisdom and you listen in your funny hats and archaic gowns, feeling pride and an amazing sense of hope. Somebody somewhere decided to spread that around - why not make it special for everyone! And now I have to sit through a kindergarten graduation! By the time a child reaches college she has already been through a dozen so-called graduations with much pomp and ceremony, and the graduation from college means nothing. Yeah, the president is speaking but I am going to show up in my bikini! In the process of making little things special we have destroyed the importance of a truly special event. I am guilty of this too because by letting my kids ice cream whenever they want, I have robbed them of the childhood joy of going out for ice cream.

Even if my own child is in KG, the graduation ceremony at the end still means nothing to me. The kid has barely started and has not yet achieved anything. I am all for praising children and providing positive feedback, but I do say “great job” when a great job is done otherwise “good” will suffice. If I fawn over them with “great great” with every step they take, what am I going to say when they truly do something “great”?