Memolines~ Letting her try: watching our little helper grow

So many little tasks seem trivial to adults—things we can just bang out without thinking. Why hand them over to a little kid who’ll probably just make a bigger mess? But that’s exactly the point.

One thing I’ve learned about raising kids is how important it is for them to feel involved in family life. Whenever our toddler wants to try something, my husband and I just let her. If she doesn’t do it perfectly, no big deal—unless there’s an obvious safety issue, then we explain why she can’t. Now she loves jumping in to help with everything around the house, big or small. It’s great for developing her skills.

She’s totally obsessed with cracking eggs right now. She recently figured out how to use chopsticks to scramble them, and she’s pretty good at it now. When I’m making breakfast and need eggs, I’ll ask, “Want to help with the eggs?” and she comes running.

Now she can crack eggs on the bowl’s edge, set the shells aside, and use chopsticks to beat the eggs. When she’s cracking them, she grabs the egg with her little hands and tries to poke her fingers through the shell to open it. She hasn’t quite mastered where to grip the egg to crack it cleanly, so sometimes she squeezes too hard and crushes the whole thing. She has spilled egg all over the counter more times than I can count, but it’s not a big deal. I just keep paper towels handy, let her wipe her hands, and fish out any shell pieces from the bowl. After that, she’s completely in charge.

I can totally hand off the whole egg task to her now—when she’s done, she’ll announce “All done!” and I’ll take over from there.

She has also started helping take care of our dogs. I brush their teeth regularly, and the moment she got interested, I started letting her watch. One day she really wanted to brush their teeth, so I let her try brushing our big dog’s. Her technique definitely needs work, so I hold her hands to guide her while we do it together.

Afterward, she puts the dogs in their crates, throws in their dental chews, and tells them “bye-bye, good night”. One day I watched her smoothly crate the dogs, lock them in, toss in the treats, and say goodnight—and I was genuinely amazed. These were all things I never imagined a two-year-old could do so effortlessly.

When I think about it, maybe this isn’t so surprising: kids grow by doing small things, over and over.

So many little tasks seem trivial to adults—things we can just bang out without thinking. Why hand them over to a little kid who’ll probably just make a bigger mess? But that’s exactly the point: all these big and small experiences add up to shape who they become and how they approach things later on.

We love watching her figure these things out. We do our best to stay chill about it—we don’t expect perfection or demand that everything be spotless. When you’re parenting and want to keep your sanity, you have to let go of the small stuff and let them try. Little by little, we’ve realized there are actually things we can hand over to her. Some tasks we just supervise, like feeding the dogs or getting them in their crates. Other things she can handle by herself, like scrambling eggs or washing fruit, which gives us a chance to tackle something else.

This way, she’s happy, we’re less stressed, and it feels like we’re onto something good.