When my daughter Siena was born, and the house around me began its irreversible transition into the cluttered quagmire of parenthood, I made jokes about training her to wash dishes, mow the lawn, and mop the floors, all before Siena was one month old. “Enough laying around,” I teased while holding her sleeping body. “It’s about time you started to pull your weight around here.”
Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, then, when shortly after she learned to walk she began emptying the dishwasher. Like any nervous parent I watched as she extracted cutlery from the basket, but then she handed it to me to put away, one piece at a time. Soon she pushed me away, having realized that she could drop forks and spoons into the drawer without my help. Naturally I cheered her on, fetching the camera with visions of email messages sent to my family. The caption: “Siena, finally doing the dishes.”
This was only the beginning. Like a work-at-home Tom Sawyer with a fence to whitewash, I appointed myself Siena’s manager and asked myself how I could leverage her natural abilities to add value to my workplace. The possibilities were endless. Thanks to her skills with in-out games, her desire to play with water, and an uncanny knack at destroying things, I’ve employed my daughter to organize my books, get stains out of my shirts, and shred important documents before trashing them.
All parenting books talk about involving your kids, but so few of them have figured out how to monetize that involvement. Boy, did they miss the boat. I mean, for more than a year Siena has shown a huge affinity for talking on the phone. If only she knew how to write down messages….