88. Embracing the Chaos: Letting Kids Learn Through Imperfection

Remember the time your toddler, with the best of intentions, helped you with baking cookies...only to have it end in a complete mess? 

You're not alone! On today's I  share the beautifully chaotic journey of embracing the messiness of parenthood. 

From stepping back and letting my boys do their own school projects to cleaning my car and folding laundry, I chat about how these imperfect adventures shape our children into independent, resilient individuals.

 Join me as we laugh about the unexpected joys and occasional messes that come with letting our kids learn at their own pace.

*** Get my Potty Training Digital Course HERE

📺 Watch the episode on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLOpw5ui4uxJHx0tLFVtpnfSkpObfc4d-K

You can find Katie at:
website: burntpancakes.com
YouTube: @burnt.pancakes
Instagram: @burntpancakeswithkatie
Email: katie@burntpancakes.com

🚽 Did you know Katie is also a Certified Potty Trainer? 🚽

☎️ Schedule a 1:1 chat today: Schedule Here
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📖 Potty Training E-Book HERE
🆓 FREE potty training resources HERE
Instagram: @itspottytime
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Transcript

00:10 - Katie Fenske (Host)
Hello, hello and welcome back to the Burnt Pancakes podcast. I'm your host, Katie Fenske, and, as always, we are here to laugh about the messy and chaotic and beautiful world of motherhood, and I'm reminding moms that everyone burns their first pancake. Here we are in February. I cannot believe. I don't know. January felt like the fastest month, but also an eternity, I don't know, but it's February. I've got on my red lipstick in honor of Valentine's day coming up. Um, things are going well. 

00:41
Uh, before I start this episode, I do want to begin with a huge announcement, a really big announcement. So for the past two, two and a half years, I have been wanting to create a digital potty training course, something that a parent who knows nothing about potty training, or one in the midst of potty training and needs support, can quickly watch and learn everything there is to know. I wanted it to be for the mom I was eight years ago when things weren't going well. I had no clue what I was doing. I didn't know where to turn to get just information that was going to put me back on track. So I made it with that Katie in mind on track. So I made it with that Katie in mind. It is done. I have finally completed it and it was launched this week. I'm super excited. I've had people beta test it and the response I got was really overwhelming. I was really nervous to ask people for a critique or review, but the things that these moms are saying and knowing that one mom watched the course already and their her child's totally potty trained already was just so wonderful to hear that it's helping other moms. So if you are a mom who is thinking about potty training soon, or if you know someone who might be potty training soon, please share this course with them. It'd mean the world to me if you could help me as this mom 44 year old mom with three kids starting this business midlife if you could share it with people. So all the details are in the link below. Go check it out or just send me lots of positive vibes, because I've been working really hard at this. So, anyways, let's get back to this podcast episode. 

02:28
Today. I'm talking about a topic that actually came up in a conversation I was having with another mom the other day. We were laughing about it and it inspired me to kind of come up with this list, this topic. So, off the cuff, I said I'm just going to start recording because this seems like a great topic and it's basically what I'm doing to let my kids do things on their own, even though they're not good at it, even though it's going to take 10 times longer or create a giant mess, because, let's face it, sometimes it's easier for us to do things ourselves. But what fun is that? Right? It would be more fun to have a giant mess in our house, right? Okay, so let's start with the first thing that I am letting my kids do pretty much by themselves. 

03:22
Talking about independence, I know I mentioned this last week on the episode when I was kind of talking about how hard it was for me to let my sons ride their bikes, where I couldn't see them, like, go out and do things on their own. So here's something that I have started just saying yes, you can do this for me, and that's cleaning my car. Yes, my actual car. Now, is it helpful when my boys clean my car? Absolutely? Is it perfect? Nowhere near. 

03:49
My boys love to clean my car. I'm going to use air quotes clean my car when we're at the gas station. So Maverick wants to use the entire squeegee on the whole car, not just the windows, but every time I get gas he jumps out and wants to do it Inside. I'm thinking to myself we're going to have water spots all over my car. He uses the squeegee but doesn't do like the rubber part on the back where it like cleans it off and makes it look nice and put together and sharp and clear. But is he learning to do something that would be very helpful in the future? Absolutely, so I've also let them clean my car in the driveway so we have like a bucket, some sponge, some towels out the hose. 

04:42
They ended up squirting each other. They ended up squirting me, because I'm out there like kind of supervising. So it's always kind of crazy. But I'm thinking that when they're teenagers and I offer them this that they'll do a good job at it, then we have started paying them money for it. So we don't really have a ton of things that we pay them for, but we were trying to think of like extra things that they could do for us that we would pay them. So picture that spots everywhere, everywhere. Somehow they managed to miss half of the dirty spots. When they're cleaning, they spend maybe most of the time, 90% of the time spraying the tires, cause. That's the fun part. But I'll take the water spots If it means that I'm not the one doing it and I think I don't know. That's a good life skill to know how to clean your car, how to clean mom's car, when you get older, okay. 

05:41
So another thing that I let them tackle on their own even though it'd be much easier if I did it for them is folding their laundry. Number one I hate laundry. With three boys, we literally just have one laundry basket in their room. They all share a room and so it's just a pile of all of their clothes and I feel like it fills up every single day, like I do a load of laundry and it's already full the next day. 

06:12
Now, when I say that they have to fold their laundry, it's not necessarily folding. I'm going to use that term loosely. Their drawers are basically one step away from them, just like dumping the basket in and calling it a day, which is kind of how Ronan does it, day, which is kind of how Ronan does it. I have shown them many, many times how to fold it the way I'd like it folded, how to fold it neatly, you know, stack them up, put everything in a nice line. But they're getting there. I would say they're getting there. At least. The fact is they're doing it. If they can close their drawer, fine, that's. That's pretty much what I'm going for. But every two or three months I'll probably just go through. I mean it. It drives me crazy, it stresses me out when I open their drawers and see it like that. So I do go through. Maybe about every three months I'll dump everything out, refold everything, put it in nice rows and be like please keep it like this. Um, I'm hoping one day it sinks in and they figure that part out. 

07:11
I actually think jet my middle. I think he's going to be the one to keep his things neat and tidy. He's just he has like an engineer brain. From the start he's always been like a little bit neater. Like he keeps his bed, like his stuffies I mean the other two it's just a pile of blankets and stuffies and just tends to be like my blankets folded or my stuffies. So I think he's the one that's going to keep his drawers neater. But at least I'm instilling in them Now, like we fold our clothes before we put them away. 

07:43
All right, now here is the story of where this idea actually came from for this podcast episode School projects. Okay, so I have two different opinions or views on school projects. Now I, for the most part, let my kids do it mostly themselves. As a former teacher, I do appreciate when projects look nice, because most of the time you're just playing in your classroom and I was always impressed. But you can tell, like you can absolutely tell the kids whose parents helped them, the kids whose parents did it for them and the kids whose parents didn't do anything. We're kind of in the didn't really do anything boat. Just having three of them, it is really hard to get projects and homework and stuff done and I feel like I backed off way more than I ever thought I would. 

08:36
So in I think it was third grade, ronan had a project. The teacher sent like very vague instructions. She said the kids are all picking an inventor to um research and they're going to be creating a project based on that invention. So I thought, okay, cool they. She wanted them to come up with a list of supplies they needed and our job was to um help them, bring the supplies to school and then finish the project if they didn't finish in class. 

09:10
Now, ronan, mr, I start something and I'm done as soon as possible, which is kind of like how I was as a kid. So I don't want to knock him for that. But for some reason he like he picked the inventor of a bathtub or like the shower, it was something in that line. I think it was like the inventor of the bathtub, not sure how he picked that, or if something in that line. I think it was like the inventor of the bathtub, not sure how he picked that, or if it was a sign. I don't know what it was but, um, he asked me to get him some modeling clay and some paint and this and that. So I was like, okay, you know, we sent him to school with a few items. I really at this point wasn't even sure like what this project was. I was like, okay, he's doing it at school, great, he's being independent. 

09:50
Um, then we had open house a couple months later and on everyone's desk is their project that they did for this like big research thing. And I was in the classroom and I'm like, oh my gosh, like there are giant busts of people's faces that are perfectly decorated and colored. There's like these gorgeous displays, and then there's like a pile of clay that has a little hole in it in the middle, not painted, it's like the color of clay, um, and it is half fallen apart because Rona said it broke at some point. And he said, mom, here's the bathtub that I made for my project, and he seemed very proud of himself. He didn't seem bothered by it. I, as the mom looking at all the other projects in the classroom, felt slightly embarrassed that this is what my kid made. And wow, look what everyone else made. And then I asked him I'm like were you allowed to bring this home and work on it? He's like oh, yeah, yeah, the teacher said that we can make it at home, but I was already done so I just left it here and I was like okay, clearly, from looking around the room there were lots of kids who took it home and got help. But there you go. My kid made a bathtub for school. 

11:07
Another one is and I hate this project the turkey disguise, like a turkey wants to be disguised as something else so it doesn't get eaten at Thanksgiving. All of my boys have had to do this so far. Jet had to do it this year and I mean with Ronan. We like went to the craft store and got like feather. I don't know what we got, I can't remember what it was but Jet's like oh, I want to make him into a Ninja Turtle. I was like, okay, cool. Like I showed him a picture of a sample one and I'm like what do you think about this? He's like, yeah, I can do it. He grabbed the markers, he started going and before I even noticed like he had already colored on it, done it. It definitely looked like he did it himself, but I also didn't have to spend hours working on it because he just did it. I did see it in the classroom with everyone else's and again I was like, okay, that one is my kids and those other beautiful turkeys that have feathers and foam and like lots of supplies. My kid just literally colored on his. But again he did it on his own and not once did he say anything about it not being perfect. So there we go. 

12:20
Okay, let's talk a little bit about food. So my kids have started wanting to like make their own snacks sometimes. So I'm just talking about like sandwiches with tons of peanut butter and, of course, a giant mess on the counter. But lately Maverick has been asking, he's been wanting to make homemade Uncrustables. So you know those like peanut butter and jelly sandwiches that are frozen, that you can get. One day we didn't have any at home so I was like, oh, I can make you one. And I had like a circle template or a circle cookie cutter thing. So I just made one myself and he thinks it's the coolest thing ever. Side note that uses two whole pieces of bread and the little circle is not that big. So I feel like every time he wants one I'm like this is such a waste. You're taking up two, two pieces of bread when you're barely eating one anyways. So he has been wanting to make those on his own. There, it is true, there's peanut butter everywhere. The the knife is covered, um. But the other day I was sleeping in on a Saturday, a very rare Saturday that got to sleep in. He was up already and he made his own breakfast, which felt amazing. 

13:34
Ronan has been very into making scrambled eggs lately. That one I do supervise a little bit because I don't want him forgetting to turn off the stove and burning our house down. But they're learning, they're figuring out how to take care of themselves and I think that's important. Now I'm going to teach them also that when they make something, they also get to clean up by themselves. So I'm not doing all that. Um, another thing I'm doing this year. I'm taking it a little step further. 

14:00
So we were in the car yesterday and the boys were talking about Valentine's and they were like, oh, wouldn't that be cool if there was like an anime one. They're very into anime. I don't, I was never into this, I don't even know if they had this growing up. Um, but they're very into anime like Naruto, uh, I don't know all these things that they watch and they have these books from. But they were like what if we? We did uh, uh, they named some character and in my head I was like we're not going to find those at Target or the grocery store. So then I started thinking like they've been very into wanting to like use my computer for projects or like film things on the iPad. I'm like what if you guys Ronan is also very much into drawing what if you drew your own like character and then we like edited onto the computer and made your own Valentine cards and then we can just print off tons of them? Um, so this, not only is it, they're making it with their own hands. They're feeling very proud of themselves, but I'm hoping this will save us a few bucks because we're making them at home. So that is something that I'm actually very excited about like seeing what they're going to come up with on their own Valentine's and we can literally just like print them on the computer and they can have their like own little writing on there or they can do it on the computer. I think it's going to be fun. So will it turn out as cute as store-bought ones or like Pinterest-y ones? No, but I think they'll think it's very cool that they have like special anime homemade carts. 

15:29
So why do I let my kids do these things, even when they're not going to be perfect and they're going to take way more time and make a mess? Because this is how we learn everyone. We learn by making mistakes and we learn by not being perfect. It's how my kids are going to gain independence and confidence. They're figuring out that it's okay to make mistakes, which, again, is still hard for me to learn as a parent. But the effort that they're putting in is more than what perfection is. So we need to be real for a second, though. This is not easy for parents to do, and I'm not saying like, tune my horn and saying, like, my kids do all of this by themselves. 

16:14
It is very hard for me to sit back and not be like Maverick. Can I please, can I please wipe those water droplets off my car and just let him do it on his own? We live in a time when everything feels so performance-based. Social media shows us picture-perfect crafts and spotless homes and kids that look like they walked out of a gap ad, whereas my kids literally dress themselves half the time. 

16:38
Maverick's pants are backwards, not a joke. 

16:42
He tends to wear his pants backwards. They look like slobs, but they're dressing yourselves. They're feeling more comfortable in their own style. I do make them wear jeans or something nice for occasions, but it is very tempting to take over and make everything look right so that we can meet those impossible standards, but the truth is, our kids don't need to be perfect. They just need to be real and be themselves. They need to know that it's okay to be messy and to try and to fail, which is really hard for us as parents to do. It's hard to see your child fail or turn in a project at school that looks like a mess. 

17:28
So to all the moms out there who let their kids fold their laundry lopsided or draw very silly turkeys or have water spots all over your car. I see you and I'm with you. You're doing the hard work of raising these independent and resilient kids, and that is something to be very proud of, because it's not easy. All right, thank you so much for hanging out with me on burnt pancakes conversation. If you have a story about letting your kids do something messy or imperfect, I'd love to hear it. If you're on YouTube, you can drop it in the comments. If you want to send me an email or message me on social media, I would love to hear. Now, that's it for this week. I need to get my kids who are currently making their Valentine cards and make sure they haven't used an entire ream of paper or gotten glue on the couch. So it's time to end this episode, but before I do, I want to remind you that everyone birds their first pancake, so just keep flipping you.