What If Kids Are Actually Life’s Cheat Codes, Not Just Tiny Chaos Gremlins?
These days, we tend to view kids as a nuisance and a drain. We've forgotten how much they have to offer if we let them.
adamkaz | Canva What if kids are life's cheat codes?
When I finished work this past Wednesday, I was anxious to get outside. The week has been uncharacteristically warm and sunny — a teaser, no doubt, before the next bout of rain and wind.
I find it somewhat difficult these days to enjoy uncharacteristically warm and sunny weather. The brightness carries dark undertones, a reminder that everything we once thought of as “characteristic” is shifting under our feet. Or perhaps more accurately, above and around our heads.
But on Wednesday, determined to enjoy the warmth and sun, I decided to walk to the grocery store. On the way there, I passed my nine-year-old son, who was wielding a shovel in a neighbor’s front yard, alongside four other shovel-wielding friends.
I checked in briefly with my neighbor to make sure that the enormous hole they were digging in her front yard was sanctioned. She laughed and explained that yes, she was planting a tree.
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My son and his crew of neighborhood boys had gone up and down the street knocking on doors to see if they could scrounge up some work. What they really wanted to do was go to our neighborhood junk food store (a local version of 7-11) and buy snacks. But no one had any money.
My son had wielded a shovel in other neighbors’ front yards just a few weeks prior when the ground had been carpeted with snow. He and his friend had delivered hot chocolate to neighbors and offered to shovel their driveways. They didn’t explicitly ask for money, but they eagerly accepted tips.
My neighbor, who had generously overtipped my son and his friend $20 (apparently a $20 bill was all he had), told me afterward, “I just loved watching them out there. They were working so hard and trying to do such a good job. It made my day.”
His comment made my day. One of many things we’ve lost as a society in recent decades is intergenerational community — that is, kids and adults of all ages giving and receiving from one another.
We’ve become increasingly segregated by age, and adults have become increasingly segregated by parental status. We’ve separated our gathering spaces into “for kids” and “for adults,” and we tend to treat children as generally helpless and wholly dependent creatures who will inevitably ruin adult fun.
In the process, we’ve forgotten all that kids have to offer us.
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When they are young and cute, they can simply bring us joy by being young and cute. When they are older, they can do things, like shovel driveways, dig holes, take care of other children, bake cookies… the list goes on and on. And when kids do these things, everybody benefits.
Most of the families with kids have been tragically squeezed off our street, often squeezed out of the city, inevitably replaced by couples without children who have a little more money to spare. My initial reaction is often one of disappointment because these days people with and without children tend to operate in parallel realities. But it’s my son, with his earnest door knocks and his constant quest for junk food money, that has helped us bridge the divides.
My neighbors not only get help with chores, but they also get a chance to interact with kids — and yes, even slightly rancid prepubescent boys can bring us joy.
The kids learn about the value of labor and then get to reward themselves with Nerd Gummy Clusters, or whatever chemically manufactured sugar-drenched snack catches their fancy.
And yours truly gets a little break from the relentlessness of modern parenting, secure in the knowledge that my son is being useful, using his body, and interacting with people — not sitting alone inside staring listlessly at a screen.
On teacher planning days, my daughter and her friends have started a tradition of buying pastries and walking them over to their middle school to distribute to teachers. The kids get something to do and the satisfaction that comes with doing a good deed. The teachers get pastries, and I have some time to focus on my day job. Win-win-win!
My neighborhood community never feels quite as tight-knit as I’d like it to feel, but I also know that in this day and age, I am beyond lucky to be able to give my own kids some semblance of the childhood I enjoyed. This past Wednesday, I felt warm and fuzzy to the grocery store, and it wasn’t just because of the uncharacteristic sun.
Kerala Taylor is an award-winning writer and co-owner of a worker-owned marketing agency. Her weekly stories are dedicated to interrupting notions of what it means to be a mother, woman, worker, and wife. She writes on Medium and has recently launched a Substack publication Mom, Interrupted.