Last week’s Monday morning meeting brought to light that we as parents and teachers conveniently let our children get away with unfinished tasks or ones that are hurriedly carried out. How many times, as teachers, have we contributed to allowing students to get away with not owning a task? How many times have you asked your child to do you a favour at home and it either gets half done or not done at all? One of the skills we are concentrating on this year at ‘The English Learning Centre’ is ‘ownership’ aka responsibility. I wanted to write a blog post on this because as a mother I see that my children don’t ‘own’ the tasks they take on or what they set their mind to and rarely do my students. Responsibility seems to be a thing of the past. Well, it is time to bring it back into our present so that it becomes part of our future.
What is ownership? Owning a task; seeing a task through from beginning to end and making sure it has been completed to the best of your ability. Do your children own their tasks? How many times have they committed to something and not seen it through to the end by themselves without giving up or asking for help? Carrying out a task with all it entails, with pride from beginning to end is an accomplishment. We need to work on helping our children own their tasks and understand the importance of responsibility of that task if they are ever to get that feeling of accomplishment because let’s face it, it’s a hell of a good feeling.
My two eldest children stormed through the front door a couple of weeks ago with indescribable excitement because daddy cool had bought them a 1000-piece puzzle! A little too ambitious on his behalf as they had never challenged themselves with one before, nevertheless I liked the idea. So eager to get it done and in full partnership with each other (a rare phenomenon), they couldn’t wait to get started. I had significantly lessened their electronic allowance time as the lead up to schools starting found them idly screening their time away. So enter the puzzle – a great pastime even though a 300- piece puzzle would have been more appropriate.
Opening the box and pouring out all the little pieces hit them with a hammer! I could feel them starting to get lost. Hubs and I went over the rules of assembling a puzzle but to no avail. Fighting like cat and dog between themselves due to frustration, they managed to follow a couple of straight forward instructions to get them moving over the course of the week. Turning the pieces the right way up, segregating colours and finding the edges were as much as they could cope with until they came to us moaning wanting help every five minutes, eventually giving up because they didn’t have any patience or wish to be challenged. So we helped, and we helped some more until we were told to finish it off ourselves. They totally gave up! They got bored! They lost interest!
They didn’t own the job they took on! They just wanted to get it done so they could see it up on their wall! They were happy with a result they didn’t work for. The only reason I let this one go is because it was over and above what they could do. I do believe though that a 300- piece would have had the same effect only I would have made sure they saw it through to the end.
done!!!
The moral of the story is that children don’t take pride in what they do, they don’t have that fierce desire to get things done by themselves – they know they can be bailed out, there’s always a safety net there for them. My children gave up so easily, they lost interest because it was challenging (they are used to being spoon fed as we all know) but at whose expense is this? Theirs! So our duty and job as mothers and teachers is to pass on to them the desire to own, to take responsibility, to take pride in the job they have in hand and to complete their tasks by themselves – OWNING THE JOB and to be frank this is true for all of us whether in the workplace or at home.
