Let your tots do what the Japanese kids do on the TV show “My First Errand,” and I’ll be visiting you at Sing Sing.
Take a look at the video I posted at Let Grow. The kids look like they’re about 5 and 3, and off they go — to several different stores — to get the ingredients (that look spectacular) for dinner. There are tears and then — triumph!
It’s not that American kids are so much less capable that kids in other countries, just that we act — or are encouraged to act — as if they are. At which point it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. As opposed to a shelf-filling prophecy, which is what these kids do. Gosh they get a lot of different food and oh my does it look good.
Let’s un-dim our expectations of what our kids can do, for everyone’s sake. (Not sake like the drink. Sake like…for goodness’ sake.)
L
I still remember my first shopping errand. I was about to turn 5, and was sent to the corner store to get a box of cake flour for my birthday cake. I had to go down the block, across a busy four-lane street (minding the stoplight), find the cake flour on the shelf and bring it to the cashier, discover I’d been sent with not enough change, come home to get another nickel (apparently the price had gone up from 57 cents to 62 cents since last my mom had bought some), go back across that four-lane street, buy (finally!) that box of cake flour, and lug it home.
The fact that I remember it so well sixty-one years later shows how important it was to my five-year-old self.
A very necessary video for all parents, just a must see!
Such things should be worked through from childhood, although I think children are developing much faster than we did in our time, such streams of information and they are already catching them from a small lot