Children Need Purpose

Otherwise they grow up aimless, depressed, and lacking in basic skills

The Aimless Generations

I see generations of children growing up who never had to do anything as kids. I know because I’m one of them.

I grew up in a city. My parents did everything for me. Besides a handful of minor chores like taking out the trash and cleaning up my room, I was essentially not a helpful member of the household. It’s not because I was lazy - my parents didn’t want my help. And I’m not the only one. This is now the default.

Whole generations are growing up in cities where our lives are of no consequence until we suddenly become adults, and then we encounter the real world - big, scary, and anxiety-provoking. It took me years to overcome that, find my footing, and become a self-actualizing adult.

The real world doesn’t care for incompetent and incapable people. If you can’t look someone else in the eye and maintain a conversation, you will struggle to make friends, find a job, or even just function in society.

That’s why we see so many young adults who grew up not making their own food often default to eating out in college. After 18 years of life on this planet - they never learned the basic skill of cooking for themselves. Never mind critical thinking, map reading, budgeting, carpentry, bushcraft, or any number of other useful skills they should have been learning.

But that’s what childhood is for. It’s for experimenting, learning, doing, playing, and having purpose. That’s not something you’re meant to learn at 18 when you’re thrust into your first job, college, or a special “how to be an adult” program (yes, they’re real).

Our Job as Parents

As parents it’s easy for us to say, “I’ll just do it myself”, and exclude our kids from various tasks. It’s often faster to just get things done myself, right? But then I have to ask myself, why did I bother having kids if I’m just going to be impatient and rush off to do chores myself?

Every day I go to the garden my 3 year-old wants to come with me. He’s cute and I love his enthusiasm - but I also have to be patient as he takes several minutes to put on his shoes, gets distracted several times on the way there, and then whines about how it’s hot.

But when he comes back with a basket of vegetables for our family to eat, he has purpose. He’s learning. He’s helping. His life has meaning. And he gets to hang out with his dad.

The interesting thing is, sometimes he really does help. And if I didn’t give him a chance, he’d never be able to prove his value in the garden. And he’s just 3. Imagine what he could do when he’s 10!

We need to stop babying our children. Stop finishing hard tasks for them, or doing something for them because they’re taking “too long”. I’m not saying don’t help when they genuinely need help (they need to know they’ll get help when they need it and that we love them), but have discernment. Don’t rush in too quickly, let them try to finish a difficult thing first. Overcoming difficulty is how confidence is built.

Every cucumber picked, every screw tightened, every step stool moved - every little thing they do adds up. My kids, as little as they are, can independently go and feed our animals, let out the chickens, collect eggs, pick tomatoes, put on their own bandaids for each other, and so on.

Of course, if you live in a city, you might need to get creative. People aren’t meant to live in concrete boxes on top of each other, produce none of their own food, and be plugged into an endless entertainment machine all day long. They’re meant to wander, explore, build, sow, harvest. All of that requires a homestead. That’s one of the reasons we moved out of the city - I genuinely don’t think children can thrive growing up in that kind of environment.

When they grow up, my kids will have had an almost two-decade long track record of working hard, failing, trying again, and succeeding. Building self-confidence isn’t done overnight. It’s not done with a self-help book or a therapy session. It’s done one step at a time, proving to yourself that you can get things done, that you’re competent, and that what you do matters.

Don’t take that away from your children.