Raising Kids Who Love To Make Things

It’s lunchtime as I write this and my daughter Lizzy is making lasagna, not helping with lasagna but making it. Her brother Peter sulks nearby because it was supposed to be his turn at the stove this weekend, and these two now argue over who gets to cook the way other kids argue over the front seat.

For years I was the best cook in this house, and that title is gone. I lost it on purpose, and it’s one of the better things I’ve done as a father.

Nobody warns you that if you raise kids who make things and do it even halfway right, they pass you. Not someday when they grow up but soon, while you’re still standing there holding the spatula. What took me far too long to believe is that you can do this too. Anyone can. You don’t need to be handy or have money or a plan, because I had none of those things.

I’ve spent twenty years in and around Chinese factories, watching people make things at a scale most people never see. You’d expect me to have arrived at fatherhood with some grand theory of how to raise makers. What actually happened was dumber and far more reassuring. I kept buying cheap kits, fumbling them myself, and getting out of the way.

It started with KiwiCo crates, the little build-it boxes that arrive in the mail. Both kids tore into them, with no plan beyond a box on the table and a yes. Then the boxes carried the two of them off in completely different directions.

Lizzy got a MEL Science chemistry kit, and we did the first experiments together with me reading the instructions out loud and both of us a little nervous. Within a few months she was correcting me. Today she runs experiments I don’t understand, and when she isn’t doing chemistry she crafts everything in sight. Right now that means an entire Monopoly set for school, built from cardboard and 3D-printed pieces she designed herself from start to finish.

Peter went the other way. I bought a Pinecil soldering iron and tried to solder a few things, but was honestly not very good at it. So Peter picked it up, and after one CircuitMess kit he was gone. Then came a run of Geek Club boxes, out of which he built a 1:10 scale model of the Curiosity Mars rover. Around then I won a Prusa MK3 in a raffle and never really learned it. I just watched him run it around the clock, printing for himself and his friends. These days he builds websites and books with AI better than I can. At the moment he’s buried in a Darth Vader costume for Halloween.

Two kids and completely different mediums, all running on the same engine underneath. It was never about the medium, which is why anyone anywhere can do this. I didn’t teach Lizzy chemistry because I can’t do her chemistry, and I didn’t teach Peter to solder because I’m worse at it than he is. I was never the expert at any of it. I was the one who bought the cheap kit, fumbled it in front of them and then had the sense to step back and say, “you do it.”

That is the entire job, and not one part of it is skill. You don’t need a workshop full of tools or a science degree, only a cheap thing on the table and the nerve to be bad at it yourself. The rest is patience: getting out of the way when your kid reaches past you. None of it requires being a maker, which is lucky because I’m not really one. It requires being a door-opener, and that is something any parent anywhere already knows how to be. The kits are cheap or borrowed or won in a raffle. The libraries are free and the experts are on YouTube. What your kid actually needs from you costs nothing: your attention, your yes, and a calm face when it gets messy.

Do that, and what they walk away with has nothing to do with lasagna or Mars rovers. Somewhere in all of it they learn that they can start with nothing and end with something. They learn that being bad at a thing is the first step and not a verdict. They learn that the world is built by people, which means they can build parts of it too. All of that travels into every job and every problem they will ever face. You are not raising a cook or a chemist. You are raising a maker.

So this Father’s Day, if your kid has spent the whole week on a screen and you feel vaguely guilty about it, drop the guilt. Reach instead for one cheap kit, one yes, and the willingness to lose your title on purpose.

Peter and I wrote the whole playbook down in a short book called Raise a Builder, where he’s the co-author and not the subject. If you want the step-by-step it’s at raiseabuilder.com. But you already have everything you need. Go find your kid, put something on the table and say yes.