Building More Than Objects at Home Depot

I have a love-hate relationship with Home Depot.

I love the store. I love its vastness, the sheer volume of its products and the shelves that reach higher than some local apartment buildings. I love the smell of sawdust and sweat, the aisles filled with metal, lumber and potential. I love the impulse to let loose grunts of “More power!” that would make Tim Allen jealous. I love feeling my testosterone levels climbing from the first steps I take at the entrance.

But I hate the store. I hate the way my sense of awe shifts quickly to being overwhelmed if I don’t know exactly what I’m looking for. I hate going into an environment where I know I don’t measure up. I hate feeling like I’m wasting the employees’ time by asking for recommendations of power tools or light fixtures or how to install a toilet seat. I hate feeling like the other store patrons can tell that I’ve put so many extra holes in our apartment walls when trying to hang a simple picture frame.¹

Facebook would say our relationship is “complicated.”

It’s not even that I’m not handy. I installed a shelf, a paper towel holder and two sets of blinds in our last apartment. I’ve built furniture, installed car seats and assembled and disassembled our crib multiple times. I can handle a hammer and nails, a screwdriver, a power drill and pliers with general accuracy and I can make the stud finder dad joke as well as anyone.²

It’s much more a matter of confidence than anything else. Practice makes perfect, as they say, and opportunities to develop my manual labor skills have been somewhat limited in my life.

That may be changing for my children, though, thanks to – you guessed it – Home Depot.

I found out recently that Home Depot offers free monthly workshops for kids to learn to use tools to create everyday objects. I brought E and S to July’s workshop where they each built a rocket-shaped pencil box. Past sessions have had kids build tool boxes, helicopters and birdhouses. They’re kits, of course; there isn’t any measuring out and sawing wood or drilling to create holes for screws. But the kids use real hammers and nails, real screws and screwdrivers and create real injuries.

I mean, they create real things.

These aren’t flimsy, paper cutouts. They’re actual pencil boxes made of wood and held together with glue and nails. If the kids hammer too hard, the wood splits. If they bend a nail or line up the planks incorrectly, they have to get a new kit. The kids – and, more importantly, the parents helping them – don’t need more than very basic carpentry skills, of course, but there is still a very real feeling of accomplishment that comes with the process. They have made something they can use and they have done so using real tools.

The other day, E asked for help with a task that he found challenging, which then morphed into “Can you just do it for me?” I seized the teaching moment and asked him what my “job” is as his father. He said immediately that I’m supposed to take care of him and make sure he has food to eat and clothes to wear. I explained that my other role is to make sure that he has the skills to be independent as he gets older. I can help him work through problems by giving suggestions and prompts but he won’t learn if I just complete every puzzle for him. The rational part of his seven-year-old brain seemed to understand my point, even if the emotional part was still frustrated. He went back, though, and solved the problem on his own.

That was my real takeaway from the Home Depot workshop. Parenting isn’t specifically about teaching a child how to hold a hammer or how to line up pieces of wood so they fit correctly. It’s not even just about helping them to feel more comfortable asking for help when they feel like they don’t belong (though that’s a big piece, as well). It’s about giving children the tools they need to succeed in life; the manual tools to serve as vehicles for their creativity and the emotional tools to handle adversity when it comes their way.

I was not compensated for this post. Also, the blonde-haired boy next to E in the middle photo on the bottom row is the son of my friend, Larry Interrante of NYC Dads Group, and I have Larry’s permission to post the photo. 

^{1. By the way, if you work for my management company, those holes were absolutely there when we moved in.↩}

^{2. Ask my wife. Her eye rolls will tell you all you need to know.↩}