How young is too young to start teaching organizational skills? Is it important that kids just have their freedom? What about cleaning their rooms? What about finances? The earlier, the better!
My wife has done an incredible job with our little girl who is 4. Every day she has jobs that she needs to do. And our little girl takes them very seriously. She is compensated for her jobs — in pennies. And she takes those very seriously, as well. She is learning about work and about saving her pennies. There is a Buddhist proverb that says
Give me a child until he is 7 years old. After that, you can do with him as you wish. Buddhist Proverb
I speak Japanese as a second language, and I speak well enough that I have worked as an interpreter. 日本語わかりますか。Somewhere in my studies, I read an interesting fact about language acquisition. If a child learns a foreign language before age 14 (approximately), they will learn to speak the language without an accent. If they learn the language after age 14, as I did with Japanese, they will speak with an accent. While I am “fluent” in Japanese, I still speak with an accent. I’m not native.
Little kids’ brains are brilliant!
There is something about their brains that literally absorbs everything. It becomes a part of them. It becomes native.
For me, I had a hard time keeping my room clean when I was 14. Sadly, I still have a hard time with organizing my home and keeping my home in order! It always amazes me to see some with abilities who are able to just naturally keep things organized. It’s native to them.
Is organization something you can teach? Absolutely. Just like you can learn a language at any time of your life. Knowing what I know about languages, I wonder if teaching organizational skills before age 14 results in a lifetime habit, a habit without accent.
Can you teach youngsters about saving? Absolutely! I firmly believe that this is very important. You probably have friends or siblings who spent money like crazy when they were young, and they probably still do as adults. Finance is a language. It is a way of communicating. And I bet, not unlike Japanese or English, skills learned before 14 are learned without an accent.
I hope so! My wife is doing a great job with our little ones!
