If you Give a Kid a Hatchet...
Maybe I’m doing this whole parenting thing the wrong way. I was reading a book about our esteemed first President and came across that oft-referred to tale about his cherry tree chopping incident.
If you don’t know the story, when Georgie was 6 years old he was given a hatchet as a gift and went bananas chopping away at his father’s cherished cherry tree. When confronted by his father about the vandalism, the future father of this nation responded with the utmost honesty, “I cannot tell a lie” and confessed to the act.
What integrity. What virtue. What a load of crock. As many of you know, this is a mythical story based on the fabricated childhood Washington’s first biographer peddled to a Washington adoring public.
But that’s not the part of the story I take issue with. My beef is with his father, Gus (alright, his name was Augustine, but I’m going with Gus). As this legend has been repeated for centuries and as it was taught to me as a kid I occasionally heard stirrings that the story may have had dubious origins. But I never, ever heard anyone question why a 6-year-old was gifted a miniature ax.
Does anyone else take issue with Gus giving his 6-YEAR-OLD a HATCHET to swing around?
“We’ll son, the revolver hasn’t been invented yet, but here’s the most dangerous hand-held weapon I could scrape up. Don’t throw it at your brother.”
I can’t even give the 5-year-old a plastic fork without risking someone getting impaled. I once handed the (then) 4-year-old a sock and he managed to scratch his brother’s eye with it. With a sock!
Helicopter parenting is one thing, but hatchet parenting is going a bit too far in the other direction. As one who pines for simpler times gone by, I want to step into Gus’s 18th century shoes and get on board with this. But I just can’t. Because little George probably chopped those shoes to pieces with his weapon.
The argument that these kids grew up at a young age and were more responsible than today’s youth is refuted in the story since the hatcheteer went off and chopped up his father’s favorite tree. Not exactly an example of the maturity and foresight one looks for in a lad before handing over a sharpened blade-on-a-stick.
Am I the only one who thinks it’s crazy that the big revelation was that the story was invented -- and not that 6-year-olds were actually running around with hatchets Edward Scissorhands style? Not only that, but it appears the biographer chose a familiar event that Americans of the time could relate to (ye old 6-year-old hatchet equipping) in an effort to make the story as believable as possible.
I suppose I could be getting ahead of myself here. My oldest just turned five, and while the thought of getting him a hatchet for his birthday never crossed my mind, maybe in a year he will have demonstrated he’s hatchet worthy and I’ll go down to the local toy stoy and inquire about one.