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The Education of Our Children
I was looking through some old pictures. My kids are 19, 21, and 22 now, and I miss the days when they were little girls. They grew up on a mountaintop in northeast Tennessee. We had 60 acres, surrounded by National Forest – it was a great place for kids to grow up. Anyway, I noticed a pattern in these old pictures. See if you notice the same thing I did, in this series of pictures of my youngest daughter, when she was 8-10 years old:
Ok, so what do you notice about these pictures?
The first thing I noticed was that she seemed to spend a lot of time doing stuff that eight-year-olds aren’t supposed to do. Too dangerous. Riding in the back of pickups (while carving a stick with a knife), riding 4-wheelers (overloaded with other kids), climbing up a slippery hot metal roof to help her Dad sweep the chimney, and so on. You may be thinking, “Didn’t she get hurt a lot?” And I admit, yes, she did. But she was indestructible (like most kids), and bounced back. Nothing serious – lots of scrapes and bruises, a couple of broken bones. But valuable lessons learned each time.
I also noticed how often she was working. Not playing frisbee with her Dad, but helping me do jobs that needed to be done. She was expected to contribute to the family at a very early age. We went fishing too, but we worked a lot. And she helped.
But the big thing I noticed was how many of the pictures were of her learning a new skill from me, or my Mom, or a friend from church. How to knit. How to shoot. How to sew. How to fish. How to cook. She can operate a chain saw, various power tools, impact wrenches, etc. She can drive a stick shift, operate a skid steer, change tires, change her oil, fix a toilet, replace light fixtures, and split firewood. And so on and so on and so on.
It’s incredible how much time we spend teaching our kids. Not schools or tutors. Family. Families spend so much time teaching kids, that the contribution of schools to their education seems almost insignificant. Now that schools are teaching less and indoctrinating more, their contribution becomes even more insignificant.
My daughter just got back from her first year of college. She goes to a very elite university on the east coast. It’s so expensive that I wouldn’t have even considered it if she had not gotten an athletic scholarship. Very selective school. Top shelf students. But she was amazed at how spoiled, and how helpless, her housemates were. She lived with four other girls, none of whom knew how to mop a floor, clean a toilet, cook a meal, or any other basic skills. My daughter basically ran the household for the rest of them. She was amazed.
She was also dismayed – “Are all the kids my age this helpless?”
I told her that it may not be all bad. As kids become more and more soft, spoiled, and helpless, kids like my daughter will stand out more. And as schools get worse and worse, and parents get softer and less self-sufficient, kids that are raised well will have more and more of an advantage. This isn’t good for our society, but it may be good for the kids out there who aren’t completely helpless. I guess.
The world is getting stranger, people are getting softer, and they’re raising some helpless kids. So raise your children well.
And if you can’t do that, you might consider my approach – just do the best you can.
It’s important. Your kids will thank you. Even for all the hard work you had them do. They’ll thank you even for that.
Well, eventually…
Published in General
The first woman I proposed to was five foot even (she turned me down). My first wife was five-foot-eleven, same as me . . .
A lot of these things seem to be at least half instinctual. And both men and women will sometimes start something that they “think” is just fine, but down the line their instincts sabotage it. Maybe your 5′ 11″ first wife had something in her psyche that made her want someone taller, regardless of her conscious decision-making. Or, if her psyche wanted to dominate, maybe she needed someone who didn’t seem to be her equal.
There are many variables, of course. Your much-greater height might have been intimidating to first choice, rather than feeling safe or something. Her subconscious might have been “triggered” by you being tall like her abusive father who cheated on her mother, or something. (Which reminds me of https://ricochet.com/973735/my-six-month-winter-in-minnesota/ that I just read.) If she’d been 5′ 5″ or if you’d been 5′ 8″ she might have said yes.
I am a gamecock, just on honest one.
My youngest married a Clemson engineer. My oldest married a Carolina engineer. Such is life.
The price they set for ‘me’ was much more than my daughter/my wife/I could bear.