Caring For Kittens

There are so many important lessons for children to learn. There are the standard things that they are taught in school, reading, mathematics, history, writing and other topics that children need to know to achieve academically. There are other important lessons that they learn by being involved in sport activities as well as community organizations. Some of the lessons are planned, organized and clearly executed. Many other lessons are learned through the child observing others in their environment. These are the lessons that often have the largest impact, and they are not often controlled, or even thought through.

In working with children and families I have come to realize that what children see and hear in their home environment has the largest emotional impact on them. The reason for this is that the life lessons that go on around all of us are what formulate our emotional development. My children are quite well adjusted, stable young adults. I know that there are many things that helped form them; one of the things that they identify is their experience of caring for kittens when they were young. Like many children my children had to deal with the death of their grandparents.

My parents were killed in a car accident when my children were nine and eleven. They had been very close to my parents. My parents had done some of the day care for the children when they were preschoolers and the children spent a great deal of time with them during their summer vacations. It was a very sad and difficult time when my parents were gone. When my parents died we went to their home to clean out the refrigerator, and to secure things. When we went to lock the garden shed we discovered kittens that were only a few days old. We checked several times throughout the day and the mother cat did not come back. My husband went to ask the neighbors about the kittens. They said that a cat had been struck by a car in front of their house that morning. We decided that we were going to have to teach the children about caring for kittens and to bring them to our house.

This ended up being a great thing. The experience of caring for kittens occupied the children’s thoughts and time. It was also magical to watch new life grow and mature at a time of death. To begin with the children needed to use an eye dropper in caring for kittens because the small cats did not have their eyes open yet and were too weak and small to drink from a dish. As the kittens grew they began to entertain us with their tumbling and playing. We ended up keeping all three of the kittens. They were loyal family pets for over ten years. I know that caring for kittens helped our children become more compassionate.