Did your parents teach you to work?
Were you raised with chores that you had to do every week or every day? How did you feel about having a responsibility? Did you resent it or did it make you a strong well-rounded person? How did your parents teach you to do the chores you were given?
Here on the farm, our children are always close at hand growing up. If I was in the garden, my children were in the garden with me. If I was in a combine, my child was in the combine with me. They learned by example, by working right alongside of my husband and myself. They saw firsthand how to care for animals, and machinery by watching and handing dad a tool or watering each plant in the garden with a bucket and a cup. They were able to see the product of our labor and they also got to see what would happen when things were not taken care of.
‘It is too late for my children,’ you say. But I disagree. If you have spoiled them by giving them electronic games and gizmos, all is not lost. Just have them use the product of their demise for good, by looking up how to care for a dog, plants or their clothes. Incorporate work into their mind-numbing electronic world and set boundaries for this school year. Let them look up how to make a meal, from beginning to end. How to get stains out of their clothes and the best way to launder them. Have them grow a small herb garden in the kitchen window, keep it alive, and learn how to use the herbs in cooking. The only thing keeping your children from learning how to work is you.
As parents it is our responsiblity to teach our children how to navigate life once they leave home. How will they survive if we never give them any tools with which to work? Teaching children the things they will need to survive is an act of love. Prepare their hearts and soul by teaching them the scriptures on a regular basis. Like exercising your body to be strong they must also exercise their minds. And teach them to work, and experience the rewards of their labor, both now and in their future.
We as writers are no strangers to work. The research we do for a single book can be quite labor intensive. Let’s use our habit of hard work to teach others through our writing. To work for things and through effort, will pay off with accomplishments and satisfaction
Go to the ant, thou sluggard; consider her ways, and be wise:
Which having no guide, overseer, or ruler,
Provideth her meat in the summer, and gathereth her food in the harvest.
Proverbs 6:6-8