More Patience Please

One gift the boy received was a woodworking kit. It consists of a motor which can be oriented 3 ways, along with necessary supports parts, to operate as a jigsaw, a drillpress or a lathe. Woodcutting capacity is small, as would be expected. The wood that comes with it is pine and it’s all very thin stock. The lathe can handle pieces probably as much as 6 inches or so, though that’s pushing it. Oh, almost forgot, it has a disc sander as well. So make that 4 tools.

Regardless, it’s more than enough to make some simple woodworking projects like small tops, model airplanes, jigsaw puzzles and those wood projects that are slatted together to make dinosaurs or cars or planes. Simple stuff that probably takes an afternoon of effort. (He was wondering if it’s the sort of equipment that “professionals” use- an amusing question considering the table saw and so forth in the garage.)

The boy had some initial enthusiasm for it, but it seems to be waning quickly. We turned a simple top together yesterday, took about 15 minutes to do so, and he liked that. But then we tried to make a slatted plane project and he lost interest in it after an hour or so. We’ve got most of the pieces cut out, but there are some holes to drill before we can start fitting it together. He wanted to finish it tomorrow. Guess we’ll see.

Hard to generalize things like this, as every kid is different when it comes to the whole deferred gratification phenomenon. I’m sure that video gaming doesn’t help in this regard- nothing much more immediate than pushing a button and watching Mario jump. I don’t like to push him about things I’d like to seem him do more of because I believe in the soft sell approach. My assumption (hope?) is he’ll pattern off of me and at some point will come to enjoy the building of a project more than the completing of a project. But I’m also aware that many of the things I enjoy are time consuming and certainly beyond his current attention span.

But more and more, I wonder if that’s just something that is innate to a child. In other words, they can’t be taught to like building stuff; it’s either a part of who they are, or it isn’t and the amount of exposure to it matters not.

Just one of the many unknowns of parenting.