Resourcefulness:  Teach them to Work!

Living in a family is a great blessing, and it takes hard work from everyone!  Children can learn early to feel good about the contribution they can make to the family.

I love the analogy of a family tandem bicycle.  The “family bicycle” has as many seats as there are members of the family.  Each person pedals to help the family move forward and especially to go uphill!  If any one member chooses to coast, the whole family is affected and can’t move forward nearly as effectively.  If one puts on the brakes and quits, the family suffers tremendously.  But if everyone gives it his all, the family soars!   (John Bytheway, “Tour de Family:  Doing Your Part to Help Your Family Succeed.”)

Ideas Families Have Tried:

1. Require Work:

Working together brings a different sort of family bonding.  All work well-done brings contentment and fulfillment, especially when it is done together.

In our home, we decided to not pay for doing chores—to us they are part of living in a family. Each child knows that he has an important role in our family to help it run smoothly.  So starting very young, we need them to do chores daily.  In addition, after dinner everyone is expected to chip in and do part of the kitchen clean-up.  Also, there are family work projects:  mowing lawns and trimming trees, picking up the toys together, painting a room of the house—even the little ones can help, ie by removing outlet covers.

If a child wants or needs to earn money, we provide extra jobs—after regular chores are done:  kids can sweep the porch, wash the car, clean the fridge (I love it when they pick that one!), even clean toilets for a quarter each!  At one point, we decided that our kids could earn $5 by baking a batch of bread and needless to say, all the kids have learned to make bread!  (In fact, several of the children have become better than me at bread-making!)

One summer our young boys were determined to earn money.  They began a trash barrel moving service for neighbors on vacation.  Later on, they added yard work, cleaning pools, and irrigating.  When our daughter had an expensive high school choir tour to help pay for, she started a homemade pizza business.  Every Friday and Saturday night, she and a friend would make homemade pizza and deliver it to hungry, grateful neighbors.  They learned a lot, and gleaned much business experience in the process and felt good paying their way to the costly tour that Spring.

My Favorite Idea:

2. Teach them to work.

I detest weeds!  But I am thankful for them too!  No matter how many you pick, there are always more to pick next time!  My kids know that usually every Saturday there will be weeds to pick in the flowerbed or in the garden.  We don’t have a farm that lives depend on to teach the essential need for work; but we do have a pet or two and usually a flock of chickens that require constant attention in our hot Arizona sun—or there are dire results! And always, there are weeds!

Saturday work is a part of their week from our kids’ earliest memories.  It’s just what we do. We have to get ready for Sunday.  Usually, the Saturday work consists of 1—their regular chores, only done more extensively on Saturday.  For example, if the regular chores are taking out the garbage all week, on Saturday they rinse out a garbage, too.  Or if they vacuum one room per day during the week, on Saturday they vacuum all of the front rooms.  2—Bedrooms must be cleaned and vacuumed on Saturday.  The two who share that bedroom taking turns:  one takes out the garbage and the other vacuums.  They keep track of who does which by whether it is an even or odd Saturday.  (The number 6 child is even, so he does the easier garbage duty on even Saturdays.)  3—Clothes are washed and/or put away. (About age 12, each begins doing their own laundry sometime during the week, but on Saturday, the clothes are all put away from their laundry basket.)  And 5—don’t forget weeds!  We may not have a farm to raise our kids on, but we do have plenty of weeds!

Weeding the garden does not require much skill—although we do have to teach which plants are not weeds and what will happen if the kids don’t get the root.  But usually, while weeding we can talk.  We discuss a movie or book someone just read or a school event or a favorite memory.  This is a good opportunity to teach tolerance and understanding for the younger one who is trying every possible way to get out of the weeding and play instead.  (“You used to be like that,” the fault-finding person is reminded!)   There are so many lesson to learn from weeds!  Especially to pick them early before they get huge and out of control and difficult to pick.  Which is very much like changing our habits!

I’m not quite thankful for the morning glory that grows prolifically in one part of our yard, wrapping around the flowers or grapevines and squeezing the life out of them!  But there are lessons to learn from them too!  In fact, one Family Home Evening, since the weeds had gotten out of control, and Saturday had been too busy to tackle them that week, we all went out to weed together.  Each person was assigned to come up with a life’s lesson to learn from the weeds.  In was amazing, the amount and the variety of analogies the kids came up with.  After this FHE full of work, we had an extra good Family Night treat!

3. Gradually expect more and more responsibility.

Young children will not just do their job well and regularly from the start.  They usually need mom or dad or an older sibling to work alongside them for awhile.  Start early.  Let them try vacuuming while the vacuum is still interesting to them.  Let them try sweeping when they can hardly hold a broom, if that is their interest.  Praise good effort.  Try to bond cheerful feelings with working as you do it together.

I resigned myself that I would be feeding the family’s crop of chickens each day with my young son when it was his turn to feed them.  I knew it was tricky to reach in and change the water and to feed the squawking chickens without letting them out.  It was not my favorite thing to do, but I figured that he would be learning. And gradually, he could do more and more, and even devise ways to get it done easier.  By the end of that season (our kids do the same chore for a semester), on days when I was extra busy and needed him to, he could do most of the job alone.

Each child has his own timeline on when he is ready to take on responsibility.  As the child leads the way in taking more and more of the responsibility to get the job done well on his own, the better he feels about himself in the process.  With praise, he will learn to be proud of a job well done.

4. Show kids the family budget.

It’s a great idea to map out the family finances and discuss the budget.

Mark and I found that if in Family Home Evening or Family Council, we would spell out the family income and spending plan, our children were more willing to turn up the Air Conditioning and use fans (or turn it down and use sweaters), to turn off lights, to conserve water, and to help out.  The children were amazed at how expensive it was to run a family.

We use a two-week plan for buying groceries, so we can save money by going to the store less.  We use the fresh stuff first and the frozen foods the second week.  Our children laughingly call it “feast week” and “famine week.”  But after seeing how much the family’s food really costs, they support the plan and wait for payday for “the good stuff” to be replenished.  They actually help to pace our ingredients so they’ll last.  I like to have each child take a turn to cook.  They plan ahead for ingredients, learn new skills, and are more willing to eat their concoctions.  What’s more they appreciate my cooking better and are more thankful for the food that we can buy.

In our cousin’s family, the father had been out of work for some time.  The teenage boys, though they lived in an affluent area where kids had all kinds of toys provided, learned to pay their own way.  What’s more, they started a family landscaping business.  One of the boys even postponed his college for a year, helping get the family business off the ground before turning it over to his father.  What fine young men these boys have become.  Paying their own way and sacrificing for the good of the family built character.

5. Provide good explanations.

One time when I was stressed about many pressing duties, I was talking to my mother.  Her advice to me was, “Have your kids help you.”  If they understand, our children can and will help.  They feel the responsibility to help the family if they are trusted with why things are difficult at present.

We need to provide explanations, and really talk over things with our kids.  If we ask them to do an extra good job cleaning the basement, tell them that there’s going to be company staying soon and we want them to be comfortable.  If we ask them to sweep or vacuum, tell them the any extra crumbs left could attract bugs into our house!  Or that sand on the rug actually cuts the carpet fibers and damages it.  Explain how water hurts the wood and the need for a polish to protect and let it be beautiful a long time.

In other areas, if don’t want them to eat too much candy, we should teach why—that sugar robs their body of nutrients.  If we don’t want them to play too many video games, we need to teach why, using the words of prophets that too much will isolate them, dull their minds, and ruin their concentration. https://www.lds.org/general-conference/2010/04/place-no-more-for-the-enemy-of-my-soul?lang=eng   If we don’t want so much contention, we need to teach Peace and the Plan of Salvation, with our family’s goal of living together in the top third of the Celestial Kingdom.

Every time we teach our kids to help out and why, we are bringing our family closer as friends and helpers forever.

What are ideas that have worked well for you?  I would love to have you share them by commenting below!