Share a skill or hobby

My 7-year-old grandson and I have been ice skating together weekly (more or less), and loving it! I’m hoping I can pass along the skill—and all the fun that goes with it. Ice skating might not be your thing—maybe what you can share with your grandchild is storytelling, or woodworking, or a sport, or cooking, or bird watching…anything where there is a conjunction of interests and time for you and your grandchild to devote to it. 

For me, the goal of sharing isn’t ambitious—no visions of anything other than both of us enjoying it. I’m not even particularly good at ice skating, just competent to go backwards and forwards and to stop. But I LOVE it. And for a kid to love it, they have to put in the time: Skating is one of those things you have to practice a fair amount to get your feet under you. 

(Side benefit: It’s hard for two-job, multiple-kid parents to get the time to devote to skills or hobbies like this—so it helps them out, too.)  

Keys to skill-sharing success

Find an activity in which your interests and the kid’s are in sync. Does the child like make-believe, and you like crafts? Maybe make puppets and create a puppet show. Does the child like ball games and you like pickleball? Play pickleball together. It’s very important to the enterprise that the kid be engaged: My grandson is, after a few skating sessions (see next section), eager to go.

Make the learning curve explicit. Shout-out to the person who helped me see this! She was not someone known to me—just someone skating during at a local indoor rink the same time my grandson and I were. She skated over to him and enthusiastically told him how great he was doing, that she had a daughter just his age who was learning, too, and gave him (and me!) the idea “you need your first 10 times on the ice.” We counted up, and realized he was only on #5 or #6—so of course he still had learning to do! This small piece of information—and her enthusiasm for his progress—really helped my grandson understand that his frustrations (and the pain of falling) were temporary conditions. The next week’s skating session was when he finally said to me “This is fun!” 

Gauge the child’s skill level—but also remember that doing begets learning. You might be eager to hand on your carpentry skills, but if you try before the child has the manual dexterity, ability to understand measurement, and restraint to use tools safely, building that birdhouse might end up as your project alone (potentially bored kid) or frustrating for both. On the other hand, one of the best ways to get the dexterity, understanding, and restraint is to do a building project. If you think ahead about the aspects of the skill the child can do, you can direct their contributions to those aspects. Michaeleen Doucleff’s book Hunt, Gather, Parent shows how involving children in doing tasks works for handing on skills and motivates the child to pitch in. (Avoiding the “easier-to-do-it-myself” trap is hard for me!—more on that in a future post.)

Look up “how to” or “how to teach” videos on your activity. My grandson wants to learn how to do a hockey stop. I can do one, but had no clue how to teach it. Figured I’d just demonstrate and he’d get it. Nope—a bundle of skills go into it that he didn’t have yet. But I found a video that broke the skill down into small steps, so now we can practice one step at a time.  

Watch yourself! If you were a tiger parent (or maybe just demanding), you might have tiger grandparent tendencies. But why go that way? Instead, keep it fun. If you’re doing the activity with no laughing, lighten up and focus on engaging the child. If you’re getting tense or impatient, it’s not the right project for you to share, or sharing is an opportunity for you to practice relaxation or patience (quickly!).

If possible, find a regular time or repeated times to share the activity. All the positives—sharing, learning, bonding—get stronger with repetition. 

And as always, be sure the snacks are good!