Busy Hands

This is an edited version of a post I published elsewhere about ten years ago.

"Idle hands are the devil's plaything," or so the saying goes.  I know that I'm much less irritable when I keep my hands busy.  My children, too, are much less prone to trouble when their minds are focused on their hands.  Years ago, I discovered I couldn't ask my oldest to sit quietly while listening to or watching anything.  He tried, but soon he will bounce off the walls, unable to concentrate on the matter at hand. Often it would devolve to him picking fights with siblings or testing boundaries with me.

Story time before bed was always a problem.  In theory, my older kids liked the idea of my reading aloud.  In practice, their minds wandered, and before I knew it, I was trying to be heard over simulated engine noises and interrupting myself to tell him not to run, jump, or climb.  For a long time, I simply stopped reading aloud, but that's no fun for anyone.  I really wanted to introduce the kids to the joy of reading, and not reading at all hinders that agenda.

Then I taught my oldest boys to knit.  Knitting is one of my main tools for keeping my hands occupied. That wasn't on my mind when I taught them, though.  Knitting, beyond being a practical skill, improves fine motor skills, promotes critical thinking, and encourages constructive (as opposed to destructive) inclinations.  It's also immensely satisfying to build something oneself. In short, there's a reason that hand crafts feature in the Waldorf curriculum.

With my oldest two sons' intuitive feel for engineering and all things mechanical, I figured knitting was a good place for them to start in that direction, since it carries minimal risk of injury or death.

From the outset, they were excited about it, and I soon learned that having them do a few stitches was enough to redirect their attention away from anger, frustration, or impulsivity.  It was something I could easily carry with me and hand to an overstimulated child in the car. It didn't take space and wasn't an outside activity that depended on good weather. It isn't loud like a musical instrument, either. By the time the child in question had worked ten or fifteen stitches, he was usually much calm and had moved on from whatever irritated him in the first place. It was like counting to ten, but with your body.

Then, I harnessed that power for bedtime.  There was a season when every night, my first or second son read a story to me or his brothers, and then I read a story to them.  While I read aloud, they knit.  When they were done knitting for the evening, I was done reading, and we were all much happier.

My boys are teens now, and they did not stick with knitting in the long term, but its value as a parenting tool and in helping my boys learn self-regulation was undeniable. My older daughter has been more drawn toward sewing, embroidery, drawing, and painting than knitting or crocheting, and while she's more emotionally even keeled than her brothers, I have noticed that her interests in those arts all have similar benefits and help counter the short attention span that modern culture encourages.

It's been my experience that needlework is sufficiently unusual as a hobby now that it is no longer considered exclusively a feminine pursuit. Instead, it's just a niche of "geek." The benefits are well-documented, and worth providing, even in very small doses, to all children. They don't need to fall in love with crafts or become yarn addicts. It can be something they explored for a little while as children and still be something valuable in their development.

This post has been linked to Busy Monday, Inspire Me Monday, HIH, Senior Salon, WITS, Wonderful Wednesday, The Stitchin' Mommy, Thursday Favorite Things, and Create-It!