Rasing children to be orphans

When a father teaches his kids

A six year-old girl picking apples

This screen-grab is from one of the "Dacha video" channels that I follow. The property is approximately 4 acres in size and food from it supports 15 people (according to what Afanasy, the narrator, said in a video when they were butchering a steer).

The dacha is approximately 30 miles northwest of Kharkiv, Ukraine and 10 miles south of the Russian/Ukraine border.

While it might seem very dark, Afanasy and his wife are raising their children to be orphans. They are very intentionally, and intensively passing on the life-skills that those children might need to survive without them.

That is a night-and-day difference between how most Americans either helicopter parent or ignore their children and allow them to feral/free-range or to toss the task of teaching their children "over the wall" to the professionals. 

For most of our history as a species, parents had very little time to pass skills on to their children due to our short life expectancy. A child might be born to a sixteen year-old and both mother and father were dead before the child was sixteen. So, our genetic coding is to be a sponge for useful knowledge in the first years of our (extended) lives, years that are now mostly-wasted.

Link to the video at the 4:19 mark. I ported you in where he is talking about he advantages of injection molded, plastic crates for storing apples. One factor that he did not talk about is the ergonomics of the plastic crates. Because they are wider in the direction of shoulder-to-shoulder, and shallower than most wooden crates, the center-of-gravity when full is closer to your spine and they are much easier on the back to pick up and carry.

He starts training his children on how to pick apples without damaging the trees and how to grip them and put them into the buckets without bruising them.

At the 6:56 mark he is showing how to twist the apples off the branch (although he is not narrating about that).

At the 8:25 mark he is working with his six year-old (my guess regarding age) daughter. First he demonstrates (while talking) then he inspects her as she works. Finally, he affirms that she is doing it to his satisfaction. We communicate our expectations by what we inspect.

At the 9:06 mark it is clear that his children crave his approval and are proud of their skills.

As modest as her harvest is at this point, it still represents two-weeks worth of apple consumption for her...and she is just getting started.

At the 13:30 mark, Afanasy is handing his youngest daughter (about 2 years-old) apples and she is transferring them to the bucket. His main purpose is not to get work out of her (frankly, she is slowing him down). It is to train her.

Great weather for working outside

I want to get in about three hours of splitting and stacking wood today. The fly in the ointment is that I have to unstack the wood before I can split it. Then restack it.