Here, Make Yourself Useful
Another arrow in the quiver of things I wish I understood when I was younger.
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I recently rewatched two Studio Ghibli films, My Neighbor Totoro and Kiki's Delivery Service. Amidst all the breathtaking art and compelling storytelling, I was struck by something I hadn't noticed the first time around: how the protagonists, both young girls from Japan, make themselves useful.
Immediately upon their introductions, Satsuki (age 10) and Kiki (age 13) project conspicuous amounts of energy, offering to take on mundane chores with the excitement of a child perusing the dessert menu. And this got me thinking. There's something strange about the way we perceive our usefulness. Rather, there's something wrong with the way we view our lack of usefulness.
When I was growing up, there was nothing I wouldn't say or do to get out of being helpful. If it meant anything other than playing, I turned into Randy Jackson from American Idol: "Yeah, that's gonna be a no from me, dawg." Once when I was 12, my dad left the vacuum out in the basement for what must have been weeks. It was a finished basement with a TV, my video games, some Nerf balls, and a smattering of sports equipment. I was the only one who spent any time down there. As I stood beside the vacuum getting yelled at for keeping my playroom in a constant state of disorder, it was pointed out to me that in the hundred times I walked around it in my travels, not once did it occur to me to plug it in and, you know, suck up some carpet dust. Though I had zero history of being proactive in the cleanliness department and no authority figure had explicitly asked me to do anything to or with the vacuum, one might understand my sneaking hunch at the time that a great injustice was playing out. Leaving that aside, however, I can see how my dad would feel it was a perfectly logical expectation that I, the only person who used that area, would take ownership of its upkeep and be grateful someone brought me the vacuum. To this day, gun to my head, I can't tell you where we kept the vacuum in that house. I can't even narrow it down to which floor, let alone which closet we stuck it in. Such was my blindness to how utterly useless I was.
So when I tell you my youngest child reacts like he's been selected for institutional torture when we ask him to help bring the groceries in from the car, you can seek comfort in knowing it's not just this generation of kids who take on uselessness as their identity. This is why the first few minutes of those films left me astounded. I was arrested by the disparity between the attitudes of those characters and my attitude as a shiftless youth.
I've always struggled with the interplay between preparing my children for the real world and letting them be "kids". This plays out differently for different cultures – just Google "Tiger Mom" for a small taste – but I can't help feeling like there's a misconception in American culture that "letting kids be kids" means alleviating them of any sense of responsibility for the rote maintenance routines every functioning adult undertakes daily. Even worse, I have a habit of intervening too early when one of my children begins to struggle with something, either showing them how to figure it out or doing it for them. It takes hawkish mental vigilance for me to bite my tongue while they figure things out.
I had a friend in college who watched nothing but Japanese TV shows. There was a little bodega where you could rent VHS tapes of popular variety shows from Korea and Japan, and every week he'd come back to the apartment with a fresh stack. We must have watched hundreds of hours of shows. There were no subtitles, but the shows were so entertaining it didn't matter. The shows all featured pop stars playing silly games and doing musical numbers, but every so often they would feature a more sober, pre-taped vignette about one of the celebrities. It was during one of these interludes I caught a glimpse of a different parenting approach than I'd experienced. The clip showed the man asking the child, who couldn't have been more than 4 or 5, to do a trick on a jungle gym bar. First, he demonstrated how to do it, then motioned for the boy to try it. The boy couldn't do it. The trick wasn't necessarily difficult or technical, but it was a fraction outside the boy's comfort level. He gestured for the boy to try again. He did, but still couldn't do it. But instead of saying ok and letting him give up, as I would likely have done by then, the man sat back and encouraged him to keep trying until he achieved it. The boy kept trying a few more times, but finally lost his will to do the trick and wanted to stop. The man insisted. Even as the boy cried and pleaded to give up, the man, calm as could be, insisted. At the time, I thought this was cruel. He was so young, I thought, and I didn't understand why an adult would put a child through this to achieve what I assumed was a pointless trick on a playground jungle gym. But looking back, it's more obvious what was happening. The man knew the boy could do it. The boy, on the other hand, decided after a few attempts that he could not. Thus, he adopted a self-imposed limit, which allowed him to believe he was permitted to give up. In standing his ground, the man was teaching the boy that his opinion of a task's difficulty is just that. An opinion. And when the boy finally achieved the trick, he learned those self-imposed limits can be disproven with enough persistence.
This aside isn't strictly related to how useful that child may or may not become, but it speaks to a difference in perspective for how capable we believe our children are. It's not fair to my kids to protect them from what it feels like to struggle or fail, nor is it fair for me to allow them to think being unhelpful is a trait worth keeping. The first time we asked my youngest child to empty the dishwasher, he almost hyperventilated. My weakness tried to convince me he was too young and making him do chores would rob him of his childhood. I'd be robbing him of something, sure, but it wouldn't be his childhood. Fast forward a few weeks, and he only huffs once, then gets after it. In time, with enough patient guidance, maybe he'll be the one to ask if there's anything he can do to help.
There's something fundamental about usefulness. Something core. Something atomic. Utility is directly correlated to the concept of evolution. If something isn't useful, eventually it gets selected for deletion. When I was a kid, I tried to avoid doing things that weren't categorized as fun. I thought doing too much banal activity would somehow steal away my youth as if it were a zero-sum game. What I ended up stealing, however, was a chance to establish a pattern of behavior that would become the bedrock of positive self-worth.
I thought rushing toward responsible adulthood would only add stress and anxiety to my life, so I put it off. Looking back, the phases of my life where I was the most depressed were the precise times I was holding myself back when I was supposed to be growing up. I know this because as I grew older, and my craving to be more useful finally increased, something interesting happened. I got happier.