When your kid doesn't follow the recipe
Tonight, Cash wanted to experiment with recipes in the kitchen and begged me to join him. I say recipes…he doesn’t use recipes. His idea of fun is creating and experimenting without a recipe or tutorial. I am the opposite. I signed up for online art courses back in March. We would sit down at the table, and I would carefully follow the video, adding the correct brush strokes and colors while he cheerfully ignored the instructions and created whatever he felt like with the materials in front of him. I love LEGO kits. You know, the ones with a 124-page instruction booklet and ONLY the pieces you need to build a castle? Cash prefers a pile of bricks and zero guidance, and he makes very cool-looking cars.
So. When he begged me to come into the kitchen and hang out with him making various concoctions, it sounded like a literal nightmare. Sure! Let’s…throw perfectly good ingredients haphazardly into a cup and taste them. Like we are savages. But you know what? His way is so much more terrific than mine. I know that’s how recipes are even invented. I know that nothing new gets made unless you experiment. It’s just that it’s hard for me to get there because that is not my jam. I love to read and research, and he likes to jump in. We all have our things.
What do we do when our kids’ strengths and weaknesses don’t match our own, especially when homeschooling?
I’m not sure of the correct answer to this, honestly, but this is what I do: I compromise. I give him a little direction and try to stretch myself, even when frustrated and feel completely uncomfortable. I encourage him, tell him how awesome I think he is, and resist the urge to say that he’s making a mess and doing it wrong. Tonight, I created a little bit of structure for him. Instead of throwing random items in a cup and drinking them, how about we start with a base? Tater Tots. You can put anything on a potato, right? So we pulled out all the cheeses from the fridge, and I let him pick one. He chose a nice smoked cheddar and grated the cheese himself. I let him choose the salt, olives, and whatever else he wants to add to the fridge. The result was both edible and fun to make, and it scratched his itch for creativity without me developing a nervous twitch.
This is what we do when our kids have different gifts than us: We cheer them on anyways. We help them with the building blocks, then let them run with it.