mountaintop mondays

The Art of Delegating

When I was a child, growing up on a dairy farm in Northwestern Minnesota, chores were a daily part of my life from an early age. I remember my mother teaching me how to fold laundry and wash dishes when I was five years old. Delegating and directing seemed to come naturally to her (she’d been a home economics teacher).

But it seems to me, as I’ve had children of my own, those attributes of hers may not have found their way into my DNA.

A couple weeks ago, I met with Micah’s occupational therapist to discuss goals for the summer. We’d talked about the importance of doing household chores many times, and now she circled back to the topic. She asked what he’d been doing at home to help. Sheepishly, I told her he’d been making his bed and feeding the dogs. These were the only tasks we’d required of him on a regular basis; he was so used to doing them we no longer had to remind him.

Sure, I’d worked with Micah before on skills like folding clothes, snack/meal prep and cleanup; Todd had taught him how to take out the garbage. But our efforts had been haphazard. We’d only require him to carry out these tasks occasionally. It hadn’t become routine for him…or for us.

I know firsthand the benefits of holding a child responsible for pitching in at home. I might not have enjoyed all my chores as a kid but looking back I know it gave me a sense of belonging, of accomplishment, of feeling capable of taking care of myself and assisting others. Wouldn’t Micah benefit from these feelings as well as he traveled through life?

On my way home from the therapy center, I tried to think of more chores Micah could help with. I knew our basement needed to be swept. With three dogs in residence, I’d recently noticed the accumulation of hair along the baseboards.

The next morning, I found two large brooms and dustpans. After showing Micah how to hold one of the brooms and sweep, I let him try for himself. He grasped the handle clumsily and then pushed the broom in one continual motion across the floor. I stopped him, repositioned his hands and showed him how to use shorter strokes to keep the dust and hair in front him so he wouldn’t lose most of it. We went over this technique several times.

Feeling like he had it somewhat under control, I told him I was going into the dog kennel room to work. “Keep going, and when I come back, we’ll transfer the small piles into the dustpans.”

Five minutes later, when I came back to check on him, he was bent over, sweeping a pile into the dustpan, now overflowing. Somehow, he’d maneuvered the large broom so as to get the debris into that small fixed space. I was impressed.

“Micah, excellent work!” I gushed! “I thought you’d need me to show you, but you figured it out all by yourself! I’m so proud of you!”

“Thanks, Mom,” he beamed back at me.

It was a win-win moment for both of us. Mother and son, improving much-needed life skills. I was excited to think of more chores and to get them into the daily calendar, to work on them with Micah, to seal them into his routine.

Perhaps the art of delegating is in my genes after all. Could it be, instead, I was simply practicing the art of patience?