Spring Cleaning - March 24, 2022 | Kids Out and About Research Triangle <

Spring Cleaning

March 24, 2022

Debra Ross

In early spring each year, the time when those of us who live in Nature's Refrigerator most want warmth and renewal, the sides of our highways are in bloom—not with flowers, mind you (those come later), but with the detritus that people have flung out of their cars through the winter. One March when my daughter Ella was 4 or 5, she first noticed that as the pretty white blanket of snow was melting, it was revealing the truth of Oz.

"ICK. How did it all get there?" she asked. I told her people had thrown the trash out of their car windows. "Why do they think that's okay?" she asked. "Maybe their parents didn't teach them that it's not," I said.

Since then, though, I've rethought my too-glib answer to Ella. I did at the time assume there was no way my own kids could grow up assuming their messes should be other people's job to clean, because of how much I value (and talk about) the pride that comes from self-responsibility, from leaving the largest possible positive footprint and the smallest possible negative footprint on the world. But I hadn't yet fully appreciated the role that kids' own decisions play in their development, and that despite parents' best efforts, kids sometimes don't absorb the lessons we try to teach them. Parenting tends to confer humility; I'm much more humble now than I was when I first had kids, and a lot more forgiving of parents. No matter how hard we try, some habits and principles filter through to our kids, and some don't penetrate. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try, though, because no one learns in a vacuum.

Learning TO vacuum can't happen in a vacuum, either. So now that it's Spring Cleaning season, make sure you enlist the young people in your orbit in the effort to make your world a prettier place. Then step back and look at it together, making sure they own their part in the work. They'll see how when you're longing for flowers, you can make your own world bloom.

Deb