Hinesh Chauhan argues parents should teach kids outdoor chores like washing the car, raking leaves, and gardening. It builds responsibility and resilience while getting them outside. Reward and gamify the work to make it stick.
Get this, inmates spend more time outside than kids do. And who knows how much each of you as adults are actually spending outside. How much fresh air and time in nature do you actually get? Now here's the thing. For those of you that live north of the 49th parallel, or at least within 300 kilometers of it, our six months of winter is over and it's time to get outside. And you can do this in a training, meaningful way by getting your kids to help you with work outside. Start teaching them, start training them, have them engaged and contribute to the household. That means washing the car, changing the tires, raking leaves, weeding, gardening, cleaning things up around the outside, cleaning windows. Doesn't matter if they do it well or not. The point is to get them to start doing it so they become familiar with it and are aware of the responsibility so that there resourceful. As part of the resourceful, resilient, empathetic critical thinkers that I think we should all make an effort in raising our kids. After you get the work done, have a reward, have some sort of incentive that if it's done well, we'll get ice cream or we'll go down and check out some groundhogs meeting in the forest, because hey, that's cool. Come up with something. Go spend time. Go discover. Go pick the nicest, biggest, most colorful leaf that you can find. Or try to spot random animals and make a competition out of it because then it makes it fun because it's a game and there's an opportunity to win. I'm not competitive.
