"They can't do it yet"

Sometimes that's true and it settles the matter. A two-year-old can't do a zip, whatever they think. But "they can't do it yet" mostly means "they can't do it well yet", and those are different sentences, and the second one is true of every job a child has ever learned.

Two things about children are worth knowing here. The first is that the wanting comes before the ability. Ulrich Geppert and Ursula Küster, in a small observational study of forty-one children from nine months to six and a half years, watched what happened when an adult interrupted a child in the middle of a task. As the children got older, more of them objected and insisted on doing it themselves, in stages that the researchers matched to the child's growing sense of self, and they treated that insistence as an early form of the drive to achieve things. It's a pilot study and it's old. But anyone who has lived with a two-year-old will recognise the finding, because "me do it" arrives well before the doing is any good.

The second is that children want to help long before they can. Felix Warneken and Michael Tomasello showed that children of eighteen months, barely talking, would help an adult who'd dropped something or couldn't reach, without being asked and without reward. It's a laboratory study of infants and it isn't about shoes. But it suggests that the impulse to take part in what the adults are doing is there early, and the interesting question isn't how to put it in. It's what happens to it.

What happens to it is the hand. A child who insists on doing the zip and is allowed to, badly, for a fortnight, ends up doing the zip. A child who insists and is overruled, because there's no time and it's easier, learns something too, which is that the zip is yours. Neither child could do it well at the start. Only one of them got to start.

The NHS page on teaching everyday skills says to wait until you think your child's ready, and if it doesn't work out, to leave it a few weeks and try again. That's good advice and it's the opposite of the takeover, because the takeover never tries and never leaves it a few weeks. It just does the job. The same page says not to make it into a big deal, and that a child who's learned to use a spoon may still want to be fed when they're tired. That isn't failure. It's a child.

So "they can't do it yet" is worth turning into a question. Can they do it badly? If they can, they can start, and the bad version isn't a reason to wait. It's the first version, and there isn't another way in.