The Parenting Lesson We Learned While Having Our House Painted

We were getting our house painted earlier this month (@flawlessfinishing FTW!) and one day, as one of the painters was leaving, she took the opportunity to mention how impressed she had been with our children and the routine of our family life. She said she noticed each day how the children – from tallest to smallest – would pitch in with jobs around the house to keep our day running smoothly, from dishes after lunch to helping fold load after load of laundry to gathering trash in preparation for garbage collection day. And she said it inspired her to go home and start asking her own seven-year-old to help with some of the after-dinner clean up. She said she had him wash the dishes and she was amazed at how well he did it! She told me she didn’t even realize he was old enough to do a job like that until she saw it happening in our home. Even her mother was shocked she was entrusting him with a job like that, and she said that she told her mother, “Mom, if you could see these kids at my clients’ house…! They are amazing and they are all doing it so well!”

Sometimes you never know how ordinary, unexceptional days can make an impact on people. I look back on those days when the painters were here and mostly remember the frenzy of appointments, errands, and many preparations for our annual trip to one of our favorite family camps. But beneath those surface-level things going on, this young mother was impacted in a way she will never forget by the simplicity of involving children in the tasks of every day life. There are many reasons why we ask our children to be active participants in our family life, and the number one reason is so that we can do life TOGETHER, all of us, hand-in-hand. What a sweet gift it was to be able to include someone else in that this week!