I used to think that children shouldn’t have to work, and that kids that had to were like slaves. After all this is their time to have fun. I’m so thankful that God changed my heart on this issue several years ago, and that my husband didn’t waiver in his own beliefs that kids need some work. I now realize that if children don’t have meaningful tasks to accomplish that they will quickly become bored, ungrateful, lazy, and be more likely to become slaves as adults. I do want to be clear that I think it’s important for kids to have fun too and be able to have plenty of time to work on their own projects, but the habits we develop as children will be very hard to overcome as adults. I didn’t appreciate it at the time, but I have also realized how thankful I am to my mom for demonstrating and encouraging me in my work as a kid (although I was very spoiled).
In our family we have chores that get done every day, and then we have a certain amount of time that the kids will work (this varies depending on the time of year). I remind the kids that we all eat (all of our food is made from scratch) and dirty up clothes and the house (very quickly!) and that we all need to work together to keep things clean and organized. One of my goals before our children leave the home is that they know how to cook nourishing food and clean and organize with efficiency and ease. It saves so much time in the long run to be organized, and I believe they will have an easier time managing their own homes than I did when I first started out. We are all a work in progress in this area!
Our day starts with a list of jobs and each job has a certain amount of time with it. Everyone gets to choose what they want to do. The way I figure out how much time to assign a job is that I will time myself doing it at normal speed and then give extra time beyond that for the job. Rather than saying to do something like weed the garden for 15 minutes (which produces dawdlers) they get tasks to complete, and when they are finished with those tasks, they are done. I do the same thing with our school. This doesn’t mean we rush through the jobs, or don’t do a good job, because a task or assignment will have to completed again if that’s the case. This teaches them to do the job right the first time as well as encourages them to be as efficient as possible. After all the jobs are delegated, I take the ones that are left and always add way more than I can complete in a day.
When there is extra work to do beyond the assigned time, then we will pay each child that works per hour. With my husband working full time, our farm business, skin care business, and his electrical business, there’s always plenty of things for the kids to do to earn extra money. We pay more than they could earn working for someone else at their age, because we want them to know we appreciate them, and we also don’t want them to be discouraged by the hard work of farming or projects. We also do not pay everyone the same wage, but will pay based upon skill, efficiency, and how much money they are saving us. For example, I have a few children that are so observant and good at catching problems in the early stages (when they can be corrected without a big loss) and that saves us a lot of money and time so they earn more doing those skills. That’s worth a lot to us, especially when you consider how expensive it is to fix something or replace an animal! I also have one child that is very strong and likes to do some of those harder more physical jobs, and since he is very efficient, he gets paid more when doing something like that. We also encourage our kids to serve others with their work when they can.
Yesterday I explained to my kids what my post was about and asked them their thoughts. I was a little scared to ask because we have been really busy cutting thistles, weeding, chasing crazy cows, putting up hay, and dealing with farm equipment problems without my husband’s help, but here were their responses from oldest to youngest. Alena said, “I’m glad now that I had to do the work, but I wasn’t when I was younger.” Kailey said “I know it’s good for me, but sometimes it’s hard.” Caleb replied, “I’m glad I have as much work as I do, or I’m not sure what I would do.” Aiden then said, “It’s good for me, otherwise I would just sit around and be lazy. We all agreed that he would probably read Hardy Boy books all day. Annika (age 7) said “Sometimes it’s good.” Asher (age 5) quickly replied, “I think it’s good. I like to feed the calf and pick off potato bugs. I don’t like putting away dishes.” Abigail (age 3) said, “I like feeding the horses and playing with the cats and feeding the animals.”
We all struggle at finding the right balance of work, serving, and fun, but we continue to pray daily for wisdom. I honestly can’t remember the last time I heard, “I’m bored.” Maybe everyone is just afraid to say it out loud because they know there’s no reason to be bored when there’s always work to do, but I also believe that the fact that we don’t have a tv or play video games has helped tremendously with boredom.
Some of the hardest work to do is those jobs that you don’t have to do, or work that nobody sees. I tell myself and my kids that it is those kind of jobs that expose our true discipline. By encouraging our kids to work, I have witnessed a great sense of accomplishment when their work is completed, a thankfulness and pride in a job well done, creative ideas to to make jobs easier, problems solved that don’t seem possible for someone their age, more common sense than I possess, and I have also noticed that there’s very little wasted food in our home, because our children know how hard it is to produce and prepare food. These skills and discipline in their work might even be used to save or earn themselves money in the future as well. None of this my doing, I can only say praise the Lord, because if my heart had not been changed, then our lives would look so much different, and that scares me to think about. Has God changed your heart about work? We love to hear from you!