I was volunteering at the Cherry Blossom Festival at the Seattle Center this weekend. PAPER has a table there, and random people attending the festival would come and learn origami. There were a lot of children. Obviously, children don’t always have the motor skills or spatial reasoning skills to immediately fold perfect origami. Sometimes, they will make imperfect folds, or they will take longer to figure out the step. Parents almost always respond to this in one of two ways:

  1. They don’t respond at all because they are busy with other stuff (chatting with other parents, folding their own origami, etc.) This is totally fine.
  2. They intervene and just do the step for their child. This is BAD BAD BAD.

This is REALLY BAD for a lot of reasons:

  • It teaches the kid that they aren’t good enough to do stuff on their own.
  • It teaches the kid that they’ll get help without putting in much effort.
  • The kid doesn’t get the chance to practice trying.
  • The kid doesn’t get the chance to learn that imperfection is okay.

After the model is finished—all but completely folded by the parent–the parent always goes “Wow! Look how good your origami is!” This would be fine, if the kid had folded the origami on their own. But since the parent did all the work, the parent is teaching the kid to take credit for things that aren’t their work.

Obviously, I don’t say any of this to the parents. It’s their kid, they can do whatever they want with them.

Frankly, terrible. I’ve never raised a kid before, so what do I even know about parenting?

Anyway, volunteering at the Cherry Blossom Festival was super fun. I got to hang out with all the cool people from PAPER, taught a whole bunch of origami swans, jumping frogs, and flowers to all sorts of different people (mainly kids), and met some talented folders who weren’t aware of PAPER. Hopefully, I’ll get to see them again at future PAPER meetings.

Quick update

Last week, I was at EBOC. It was super fun.

Next week, I’ll be volunteering again at Sakura-con. I’m really excited.

Expect blog posts for both.