In B&Q yesterday there were two parents and a child (around 5-6 years old) pushing a trolley out to their car. The child was insistently declaring an interest in helping to move the large boxes of tiles from the trolley to the car; the father insisting each time that it was pointless, that it would take two adults to move it, and that there wasn’t any point in helping.

One thing that helped me to develop a “growth mindset”—the view that skills and intelligence are largely not fixed or innate but the result of the right kind of study and development—was that my parents found lots of ways to involve me, at a level appropriate to my knowledge, skills, and development, in so many areas of life. I have no idea whether this was a deliberate strategy or that they just fell into it, but it was very helpful in instilling a positive view of the value of productive work.

A side note: I have often wondered if being a (to a first approximation) only child helped with my learning a wide range of skills, in particular not having a gender-sterotyped pattern of skills. Because I was the only child around, I would be co-opted into helping with a lot of things, whether cooking or washing, car-repair or plumbing. Perhaps in a larger family with a mixture of genders in the children, the girls might go off to help with “women’s stuff” from female relatives, whilst the boys do “men’s stuff” with males.