My children are becoming more independent every day. Master 6 and Miss 4 have been making their breakfast, with varying degrees of success, for about 6 months now. This is, I’ll admit, often a messy way to begin the morning but their skills have improved out of sight and the biggest issue we run into now is milk spillage when the bottle is too full for them to manage.
The other morning they decided to make toast. We have a four slice toaster but generally speaking the kids just put in their own bread unless Master 6 is also volunteering to make Miss 3’s breakfast too. Sharing the toaster can be difficult…obviously.
Miss 4 popped her bread in as I re-entered the kitchen from another errand and I sat down to finish my own interrupted breakfast when, the next thing I notice, the kitchen is filling with smoke emanating from the toaster and the smoke alarm begins its shrill noise.
Turns out Miss 4 had popped her toast down twice, and it wasn’t just any piece of bread it was a piece of crust which, as I’m sure you’re aware is more prone to burning in the first place due to their often un-uniform width.
My first response, mentally, that is, was; what a silly thing to do. But then, the more I thought about it, it wasn’t so stupid after all. You see, my husband and I have been having a particular conversation fairly regularly lately. More often than not my husband is posing a question like: ‘Why on earth would they do that?’ and of course, to adults, a lot of the things that children do seem to be absolutely ludicrous but then again, how did we learn that putting your bread through the toaster twice was a bad idea or that filling your drink bottle with sand was not ideal?
Experiential knowledge is an important part of growing up. We can tell our children, what feels like a million times, not to do something but they’re only going to learn by experience why it’s not a good idea to pour water on the floor, or overflow the bath on purpose, and that will only happen when they have slipped over in the puddle they’ve constructed. And yes Mum, it’s a good idea to refrain from the ‘I told you so’ and instead try something like: ‘Why do you think this happened to you? Do you think it could be because you splashed water on the tiles? Tiles become very slippery when they have water on them’ and so on.
Some lessons seem to take longer to learn, and others have bigger consequences. After telling my children for months they shouldn’t be on the trampoline with their then, 18 month old sister because they were bigger than her, she was double bounced by her big brother and broke her leg. Lesson learned, painfully.
It can be really hard, not to mention frustrating, trying to parent children who haven’t yet acquired the experiential knowledge but the truth is, we have to let them make their own mistakes and learn from them. And we can certainly use these experience to help them learn that special relationship between action and consequence.
Yes, burning crusty bread and setting off the smoke alarm at 7.30 in the morning is annoying, but now we all know what happens when you put your bread in the toaster too many times!
Originally posted 2015-03-11 12:00:44.