Train Their Hearts to be Teachable

I recently had the privilege of helping my friend Christi with her new baby. While she and her husband got rested up from the birth process, my children and I got to take care of their 6 other kids. It’s been a while since I cared for such young ones, and some of my experiences with Christi’s sweet kids reminded me of the days when my own sweet ones were that young.

While I was over at Christi’s, I was doing part of life’s regular tasks that all of us are familiar with, and that’s laundry. I brought the two-year-old up into the laundry process with me to “help”…..so cute!!…. (I just had to pause for a minute there to say how precious he is!! Especially when he holds his arms out to me and says, “Hi Bahbie!”) It was obvious to me that Christi is doing a really good job of having the kids be involved in her real life, because he already knew much of what we were doing together.

I put quotes around the word “help” because, as you know, it would have been much faster for me to do it without his “help”. You know what I mean. Since he’s 2, he isn’t old enough to hold the folded clothes without unfolding them a little, and he isn’t mature enough to know that keeping them folded is important, and he can’t carry very many of them at once. He isn’t strong enough to lift the laundry basket, and he isn’t tall enough to put some things away properly, so in reality, he wasn’t helping me. We were going slower, and some things probably got put in the wrong place because both of us didn’t know where they went, and some things weren’t quite as nicely folded by the time he was done with them. But he will come to be a great help in the future, because Christi is taking the time to teach him how to be a help now, and how to do all the tasks that are involved with living life. I did this with my little ones too, and as they have grown they have become full of common sense and skill; they have become a great help to me and to others.

After putting away a bunch of clothes, Sweet two-year-old and I had some clean dishtowels to put away. As he carried them, I followed him into the kitchen and began opening the drawers trying to discover where Christi kept her dishtowels. I was giving him a running commentary of what we were doing and why. I finally found the drawer, and it was low down, so my helper could easily put them in. However, I saw that Christi rolls up the dishtowels so they’ll fit better in the drawer. I began to talk with him about my discovery, as I reached for the towels he was holding to roll them up, hand them back to him, and let him put them in. He began to resist. He didn’t want me to roll them up, and he communicated that to me by clutching most of them tighter, while forcefully (well… as forcefully as a two-year old can be) putting a folded towel in amongst the rolled up towels. As I kept explaining what we needed to do, he resisted by keeping his hand pressed against the towel he’d put in the drawer so that I could not easily take it back out, and saying, “No”. He was going to assert his way of doing it. At my changed-to-more-serious tone of voice, and one more explanation of what we needed to do, he surrendered the towels, and let me roll them up for him to put in the drawer.

That’s when I remembered a truth about training little children in chores that I haven’t thought about for a while. When we allow our children to help us for the sake of their learning, we need to graciously allow what they are physically and mentally capable of doing to be part of the process. His lack of skill brought a “special touch” to our work together that I overlooked in grace for his best effort. However, we do not need to allow and overlook resistance to our guidance or resistance to showing them the right way to do a task. These reveal issues of his heart – his attitudes, intentions, and motivations – and they can be, and need to be, addressed even at his young age. Resistance and demands are not the childish sort of ways we should overlook. We need to teach our children to willingly cooperate with being corrected and shown a better way. I know Christi will continue to work at training this precious one’s heart, so that he will become easily corrected, and he will become a teachable servant who is a true blessing to others.

How about you?  Are you teaching your children how to do the stuff of life?  Are you being gracious toward their best effort and overlooking their limitations? Are you training their attitudes, intentions and motivations, being careful not to overlook resistance and demanding self-importance? Are you training them to be sweetly teachable in all that they do?