Michael Swickard
Handy kids are amazing. Your car will not start and your kid pops the hood, “Just a minute Dad, let me get a wrench and I will have it going in a minute.” You reply, “Better not let your mother hear you refer to her that way, but if you can get it going I will take care of Mom.”
Your child rolls his/her eyes. “Wrench Dad, with an r.” And as quick as you can say “handy” your car starts. You have a warm feeling for having brought this child into the world.
Or there is a water problem in the house. You discover water in places that you find obnoxious. Can you imagine the unbridled joy of having a child who can actually help you deal with the problem?
On the other hand, you might have a kid who is good at the Shot Put. It is an interesting competitive endeavor combining the grace of ballet with the brute force of competitive weight lifting and is an Olympic sport. But as a parent, it is not all that often you can make use of Shot Put talent other than have your child Shot Put a door-to-door salesperson to the next block.
A Person Who Is Handy
While some people spend much of their time on this planet concentrating on the designation of titles or degrees of education, there is one designation that I use reverently: A Person Who Is Handy. At a coffee shop it is easy to spot handy people. Usually they have a group of coffee drinkers around them asking questions about plumbing or leaking roofs or car motors.
My regular coffee shop is full of handy people since many are contractors. While I am not in their league for handy, I am competent for most repairs. Still, I enjoy listening to really handy folks talk about how to solve mechanical problems. When someone at the coffee shop listens a while and then says, “I will come by and look at it,” they do not mean to say that they will stand there, “Yes, that is raw sewage running onto your floor.” Rather, they mean to come help fix it. That is what a handy person does.
It is somewhat easy to see how we get college graduates in our society. They go to school and persevere to the point of graduation. But how do people become handy? Some 15-year-olds are incredibly handy while others simply are not. Handy is magical when kids gain that designation.
A friend of mine says, “Helping kids become handy requires they have an environment where they can experiment and learn without big risks. Give them an old power mower engine and the necessary tools and instructions to take it apart. It becomes a learning experience about setting parts where they can be found or drawing the position of parts so that you can reassemble them.”
Another handy friend, Bill, (not his real name – he does not want to remind his wife that despite being handy, he is not motivated to do chores) says, “People being handy is made, not born. Handy people grew up learning how things go together and how tools work. Their brains have learned to visualize mechanical objects. That is learned behavior.”
Bringing ‘handiness’ back
My first major handy project was a motor scooter than had been junked. My Uncle Ralph looked at it and pronounced that it was junked prematurely. He bought it for me and I spent a summer working on it. It was a great experience that contained many lessons. Those are the kind of learning opportunities that are needed to make handy kids.
Of course I am from an era when we routinely took four semesters of shop: wood, welding, mechanical and automotive, either in middle or high school. I wonder if we should not bring that “handiness” back to all youngsters starting in middle school. It might help the dropout problem since those are very interesting classes and it certainly would help to have kids be handy.
You can never tell when your teenager may be all that stands between you and a car that will not start. It is wrench with an r. I knew that.
Swickard is a weekly columnist for this site. You can reach him at michael@swickard.com.
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