Teach Your Children

As the great Crosby Stills Nash and Young said on the equally great Deja Vu album - if you ha vent listened to it get exposed to it right away.

I often ponder if I'm doing a good job at raising decent adults then they do things that in an instant erase any doubt I ever had. What led to the latest reminder was the innocent task of cleaning out the toys.

Each year at least once a year, usually in the lead up to Christmas I go through the mountains of things that my children have accumulated over the past 12 months or so and do a major cull. As anyone who has kids would know you need to do this in order to achieve a couple of things.

a) declutter
b) make room for Santa

Each time I do this I like to ask them to participate and help chose which toys they are going to sacrifice. Always with tears which I have previously tried to settle with the "it helps the poor kids" line. This year we had no protests. Not a single one.

Instead the tears were replace with an actual "want to help" attitude. What was previously an arduous task became a joy. We went through Nicks room and filled bag after bag of stuffed toys and old cars that he really doesn't play with anymore but had in the past wanted to keep "just in case". Then we moved to Ava's room. I pictured toddler tears and the tantrum from hell but instead I got a little girl who very nearly made mummy cry with her generosity. She happily gave up all but 2 of her baby dolls, her favourites. And did so without any quibbles - cause it was for the little girls whose mummies and daddies cant afford to buy baby dolls. I actually had to stop her giving away every single toy she owned.

How can one so young be so generous. I like to think I have something to do with it, and I'm damned sure that its an outlook on life I subconsciously picked up from my parents.

I grew up in a house that was full of love and not overly conscious of possessions. Mum and Dad struggled financially so we didn't have everything we wanted - but we did have everything we needed. We had a loving caring family, we had food on the table each night (even if we refused to eat it and fed the "yucky" bits to the dog), we had clean seasonally appropriate clothes (even if Nanna had to make them and they were daggy) we had pets to love and toys to play with. Part of my pondering reminded me that I never had a brand new barbie doll - I inherited them from my cousins after they were bored with them. I never had the trendy clothes, my school uniforms were hand made and never quite right. Did this hurt me - nope. Sure at the time I was horrified and always felt I was missing out on something but I think that as a person grows they tend to realise that no matter how bad they thought they had it many many people are worse off.

I learnt that it doesn't matter what you own or how much "stuff" you have, that way if you lose it for whatever reason you wont feel like your whole life has ended, as long as you have happiness you will survive.

Do my kids have "stuff" yep, they have everything I can provide for them, which is of course not everything they want (but that is another blog). At the same time I have also taught them that its not what makes them who they are, and its OK to let the "stuff" go - oh and the other really important lesson, Dogs do not like Brussels Sprouts!