A garden can bring beauty and health into a families life in many ways. When you find yourself present in such a lush environment, you tend to hear the bees humming amongst the flowers and are immersed in the bright colors of ripening fruits amidst the greens.
A well cultivated and nourished garden offers a lot of benefits to a family, not just physical ones such as its beauty and fruits, but also mental and emotional benefits. A good garden that has been cultivated season after season can teach your teenagers a lot of things about life. “When teens are immersed in nature, this is a great way for them to learn about the cycles of life” says Sam Miller, a teen psychologist.
“This can be a great opportunity for you to pass this knowledge down to your kids as they assist you in the garden and learn this lesson firsthand. By getting your teenagers involved to lend a helping hand, you will not only be able to teach them valuable lessons about life, but be given an opportunity to bond with them in a meaningful way.”
Here are a few things your teens can learn from gardening:
1. Learning to work together
Gardening activities can be quite cumbersome at times and can take a longer time if done by one person. But when you take your kids out into the garden and you share different jobs among them such as weeding, fertilizing, gathering refuse, picking up produce and so on, you tend to find out that a whole day’s job can be done in a few hours. This will let them know that complex tasks can be completed easily when there are helping hands to share the work with; it also encourages the act of teamwork.
2. The value of hard work
Gardening is not an easy job; achieving a great garden does not just happen all of a sudden it takes a lot to accomplish such. Having your kids around the garden right from the time you started to the time where your garden has grown drastically and is now produce right fruits, grains and other supplements will allow them know that you got to enjoy the fruits of your garden through the hard work you put into it.
3. Failure are a necessary part of life
In gardening, things don’t always turned out as you planned. All successful gardeners have a long story to tell about the extreme failures they experienced on the road to that success. Due to the fact that you and your kids will be dealing with nature which turns out to be unpredictable, failures are bound to happen. But this shouldn’t stop you from doing the good job you have been doing ever since you started and your teens will learn that failure only make you put in more work and try again.
4. Balance is the key to life
Maintaining a balance in life is a very important factor. Giving too much water, fertilizer or sunlight to plants can be very harmful for them and may lead to death. Let your children know the importance of balancing things in life that anything taken too much can be harmful.
5. Everything in life operates in a cycle
When gardening, your teens can’t help but notice the plant cycle. The transformation of the plants from a seed, to a sprout, to growing flowers, to bearing fruits and to their eventual deaths. This explains the life cycle of all living things and yours kid should be aware of the various stages they will pass through in life.
