Child Labour

It came to me as Little One Number Two, brow furrowed in concern, used tiny fingers to pinch and prod the wrinkles that have set up residence on my face. Although the last person I would expect to point out my faults, she was certainly not the first to suggest that I was clearly in need of repair. 

 

But it got me thinking. About Little fingers and Little jobs. The whole child labour thing. And while nobody’s suggesting we farm out children to thread Indonesian looms or strip copper wires from old computers in China, there are clearly acceptable developmental tasks that are suited to tiny fingers.

For example, Little One Number One has recently shown a proclivity to weeding the garden.  After a few failed attempts to distinguish between errant sunflower sprouts and a row of healthy carrots, he set to the task with gusto, clearly displaying both predisposition and skill. Granted, an attention span of 90 seconds works against him but still…  While Number One had his nose to the grindstone, Number Two looked on in mockery with eyes that said Fool.

Another toddler-ready task that has enough educational merit to make it into the Montessori curriculum is laundry sorting.  A simple guideline of white, dark, and coloured  (grey is however a grey area) resulted in an astounding 85% accuracy rate in Little One Number One (a success rate my husband of 40 years can only aspire to).  With an outburst of babble referencing child labour laws, Little One Number Two deigned to participate but had no qualms about joining in the reward activity of rolling and jumping in the piles of sorted clothing.  

The same sharp eyed observational skills that make children aware of tiny ants underfoot can be capitalized on here.  Little One Number Two is a scanner.  The first to sense the presence of  birds and squirrels in trees, she cocks her head and holds her finger up to request the silence required to identify the call of her favourite birdees. At a recent funeral, having spotted a crow through a window, she impressed the mourners by flying across the room full-tilt waving her arms and shouting Caw! Caw! With training she could probably scan military photos and security tapes for the presence of baddies.

Having said that, it was Little One Number One’s sharp eyes that determined that Number Two had somehow blown a shoe on our travels through the river trails and was travelling light. Fortunately, retracing our steps, the shoe was discovered by Buster the Dog some meters away.  (Clearly, this is not the best Baba Advertising but I am past fear of confession.)

While established theory states that gross motor skills precede development of fine motor skills, my recent experience refutes this hypothesis. For example, picking up tiny peas to feed to slathering dogs gathered like alligators below the high chair, is clearly not a challenge for a precocious toddler.  However, using a whisk to mix banana oatmeal chocolate chip cookie dough turns out to be prohibitive, as evidenced by the predictable (and yet still attempted) outcome of batter-coated toddlers, dogs, cats, and kitchen floor. I was again reminded that for children, actually baking cookie batter is superfluous. Fortunately, Buster the Dog, ever ready to spring into action, led the clean-up detail while the guilty parties were hosed down.

To say nothing of the technological capacity of little fingers.  When my own chubby stumps bludgeon and stab at those tiny ‘play’ arrows on Elmo’s World youtubes (a simpering take-off on the greatness that was Sesame Street) a tiny index finger will patiently brush mine aside and calmly navigate for me.  While survival in generations past required strength and gross motor skills, control over the electronic world is by buttons. 

Good observational skills and a tiny index finger could rule the world.