We did a fair amount of this stuff imperfectly, but the point was we were doing it. Nobody was doing it for us. My mother wasn’t stepping in. She didn’t correct our errors or squelch our way of doing things, even if our way was slightly different from hers. This, I believe, was my first taste of power. I liked being trusted to get something done. “It’s easier for kids to make mistakes when they’re little,” my mom told me recently when I asked her about this. “Let them make them. And then you can’t make too big a deal out of it, either. Because if you do, they’ll stop trying.”
