photo credit: Camdiluv ♥ AmmyLynn

Above all, to be honest.

Above all, to __________. (Fill in the blank with yours. Mine is write.)

It is possible to learn something new, to reinvent, to break old and begin new, to be young and ready and earnest and eager no matter your age, to wake with a spring, with a jump, to run to each day and take it, seized, wring from it the drops of life eternal, ebullient, ethereal, endless.

We don’t have to settle.

Why then, oh why then, do we?

For in the dark, in the early morning, in the alone or in the fervor, possible is not a promise but a literal pain, a weight of obligation, a burden of our own inadequacy. Reality is tough, grim, cold, inviting us just roll over,

just roll over,

just a few more minutes,

just go back to sleep.

Fools. We drown ourselves in half-inch-deep puddles, flail, gasp, die. Done.

All the stories playing in my mind and what do I wait for? Why not stop for ten minutes and write a sketch, a scene, a plot, a word or paragraph or page, why not here a little and there a little, until little by little, line upon line, something builds, becomes more than the sum, exists, grows, is a work, is accomplished, rings, demands, takes a place of its own in the world?

Why wouldn’t I? Why wouldn’t you?

Why wouldn’t we create, do the work, focus, finish, do the thing we dream of doing?

Thoreau called it: Oh life, frittered away in details.

Diapers, dishes, duties done, sleep, and all this we have chosen. We love and embrace and accept the daily fixtures and needs of our life but not at the expense of, the nihilation of, something essential to self, something essential to who we are made to be.

That separate dream. That other desire. That longing that gnaws at the core, demands to be acknowledged. This, too, is part of me. This, too, is important.

No blame. No pointing fingers. No if-only list.

We must refuse to blame time or circumstance or other people for in laying blame, we give away the power to what we blame. Blame means responsibility. Responsibility means authority, power.

My life is my own responsibility, and if I do or do not it is because of what I choose or choose not.

I can get out of bed, I can write even if no one reads, I can write even when I am tired, I can write when it doesn’t make sense, I can write when I’m distracted, I can write for five minutes a day, I can focus, I can choose.

I can build my own life. I can set my house in order. I can make the time. I can push harder. I can let go of the details. I can release what isn’t mine to own. I can quit controlling everything and start controlling myself. I can make a rule, a goal, a priority, a routine, a ritual for what matters.  It is that important.

How?

Do.

For me, sit and write. For you… what?

Planning is too often a downfall. Action is the antidote to it all: procrastination, fear, doubt, confusion, hopelessness, lack, questions, uncertainty, self-incrimination, inadequacy, guilt, worry.

Act, act in the living present.

photo credit: The Welsh Poppy

168 Hours, a book by Laura Vanderkam, is one of the best treatments of time management, productivity, and busyness that I’ve ever read.

And I’ve read quite a few books on those topics, being semi-obsessed as I am with, well, time management, productivity, and eliminating busyness so I can just do what matters most.

Step 1: get some expert advice, then follow it.

One thing that Moms and other busy, distracted people can do to start taking action (instead of running around like headless chickens) is to take the advice given by experts to busy professionals and apply it to their own lives.

Sometimes Moms tend to wallow in Mom-oriented advice which, while often entertaining, isn’t always good. When you’re really looking to get down to the important stuff in life and quit wasting time, do you need another primer on making summertime crafts or coming up with a new menu plan? Nah.

There’s a time for those, but first you need to get the basics in order. (Disclosure: for me, there is never really a time for “making summertime crafts.” The closest I come to that is having popsicle eating contests with my kids.)

So, from the expert (Vanderkam, not me), here are four principles (and my accompanying diatribe) that can help you quit wasting time and start taking action.

1. Seize control of your schedule.

You are the master of your own fate. If you want to make excuses and let other people obligate you to do stuff, that’s still your choice. I’d recommend not going that route by learning and using one little word: No. It’s a great word. You can say it nicely, and repeat it often, and it will be very effective.

Another thing you can say is, “Hmmm, I’d love to help you but I’ll need to check my calendar first.” And be sure you don’t check it right then while standing in front of the person. Wait. Give yourself time to really think through whatever request has been made of you: is it important? Does it fit in with your priorities? Do you have any desire to do it? Are you even interested? Does it pertain to life at all? Will it cause you to cut out important things? What do you have to say no to in order to say yes to this request?

Your time belongs to you and only you. What you do with it is up to you and only you. If you choose to be passive and let other people fill up your time, that’s still a choice you’re making.

2. Do not mistake things that look like work for actual work.

Ehhhm, summertime crafts? Not work. Now if you’re into crafts, and that’s something you want to do (with or without your kids), power to you. It’s your choice what you fill your free time with, and it should be stuff you enjoy.
But work is different than hobby, free time, fun time, family time, and so on. Define what work is for you, whether you’re a stay at home Mom or a work at home Mom or not a Mom or whatever. Know your work so you can know what your work isn’t. Know your work so you can make work a priority. Know your work so you can take a break from it.

3. Get rid of non-core-competency tasks by ignoring, minimizing, or outsourcing them.

Nobody, and I mean nobody, is good at everything. And nobody has to be.

You may not have the budget to hire help for all the stuff you don’t enjoy/aren’t good at, but you can find ways to make it take less of your time.

• You can streamline your cleaning and housekeeping chores. Lower your standards a little bit. You have other stuff to do. If you get a kick out of cleaning your baseboards monthly, do it. But if not… um. Let it go.
• You can trade off with your spouse. Who says he has to mow the grass and you have to make dinner? What if you’re a rotten cook and he’s an amateur chef? Play to your strengths, people. Everybody will be happier.
• You can quit doing stuff. Not everything is essential. Truly, truly evaluate the things that take up your time and just get rid of stuff. Will your family suffer or the world quake because you choose not to do something? Probably not. Drop stuff that you don’t like and that doesn’t matter; spend time on the better stuff.
• You can hire cheap help. Your own kids, neighborhood kids, students, friends, family members… Set a price on something (painting the bedroom? cleaning out the garage? organizing your paperwork? watching the kids? washing the car? picking out new curtains?) and then find someone who’s willing to do it for that price.

4. Boost efficiency by getting better at what you do.

Read up. Practice. Take a class. Set up routines and systems to enforce your best work patterns. Treat yourself as a professional and invest in the ongoing education you need in order to be the best at what you do, whatever that is.
The people who are most productive are people who are very good at a limited number of things, and who focus on doing those core things. Get very good at what you do, and do more of it.

I write about things as if I know what I’m talking about.

It’s part of the package with writing for money. Or maybe just with writing, period. You feel like, as a writer, you should be able to present some authoritative view or revelatory moment to your readers. Having readers is a big responsibility, people. You may not know what a burden you are to us writers, but really, you are. Obviously we’d all want to kill ourselves if you weren’t around, but writing for you people is serious work.

You want to know all sorts of stuff.

You want fact-checking and witty commentary, all in one.
You demand a lot from us writers.

And we strive to give it to you, really we do, because the biggest fear we have is that you’ll leave us.

You’ll decide we’re not witty enough.
Or that we’re too witty, self-consciously painfully witty like a ponytail pulled too tight.

Or we’ll give you too few facts, or the wrong facts, or not enough facts. You readers, these days, you’re so inundated with information, you have so many options, you can get multimedia anything; the chance that you’ll simply sit and read some words we wrote? Slim, slim, slim. So those of you that do stay with us (and we bless you fervently as we drift to writerly dreams at night) may not be surprised to find us kind of clingy. A little desperate. And so very, very aware of the responsibility of keeping you here with us.

And that’s why we kind of resent you people sometimes.

It’s not your fault.

It’s just the weird little dichotomy we live, writing these posts and articles and books as if we know what we’re talking about, when the one thing running through our head is just desperate, clingy, 5th-grader’s refrain: please like me please like me please like me please like me.

Please?
Because as distantly higher-than-thou as we act like we are sometimes, we really really like you. Really.

Image: My notebook loves writing group by juliejordanscott

Kronk has a shoulder angel and a shoulder demon and carries on a few bits of dialogue with them in the movie. At one point, he ends up dismissing them: “Eh, you guys are confusing me, so, uh, begone or whatever it is I have to say.” “That’ll do,” they say, and disappear.

Kronk, You, and What’s On Your Shoulder

What I’m not going to say here is that if you just listened to the voice of God all the time, you wouldn’t have any problems. First, that’s far too simplistic, kind of obvious, and also depends on what you mean by problems.

Some fine people who seemed to have it together as far as listening to God’s voice continued to encounter what I’d define as problems. Lion’s den, anyone?

What I am going to say is that you do deal with voices. Loud ones, quiet ones, all kinds of ‘em, all the time. Yours, your past’s, your culture’s, and everyone else’s. Blah, blah, blah. Know how I talk about how we talk too much? I think we do that, sometimes, just to cover us the voices blabbing away in our brains. We don’t know how to turn them off, so we talk louder to cover them up. That helps, a bit. But there’s a better way.

Get to the One Thing Already

So – big surprise – the one thing holding you back, my friend, is that you’re listening to, and then acting upon, the wrong voices. But here’s where it gets tricky, because it’s not quite as simple as a shoulder angel and a shoulder demon.

Would that it were. And maybe, deep down, it is, but the problem is that on the surface level – the level on which we hear the voices – things get muddled. Sometimes the shoulder demon dresses up like the shoulder angel. Sometimes the shoulder angel sounds, well, stupid. Sometimes it’s a regular carnival and everybody’s in costume.

Vibes. Get the Good Ones.

The reason we listen to the voices – any of them – is that they appeal to some part of us. But it’s subtle. It’s manipulative. It’s not always easy to identify, and oh-so-easy to justify. Here’s a simple way to differentiate:

The good voices move you forward from positive motivation.
The bad voices move you backward, in circles, or not at all from negative motivation.

And right now, let’s just go ahead and identify the absolute Queen of all negative motivation, at least as far as women are concerned.

Guilt, the Reigning Potentate of Bad Voices

Guilt is the Queen because she seems so right, so accurate. She’ll talk to whatever matters to you. She’ll phrase it in such spiritual terms, such self-sacrificial words, that saying no to her will seem like the worst sin ever.

But let me be the one to clarify something for us all right here, right now.

God does not motivate us through guilt. God motivates us through specific conviction (something is wrong in what you’re doing, and this is it) and then equally specific encouragement (here is forgiveness, here is how to change). God pulls us onward, forward, by showing us what could be better in specific terms, not what might get worse in vague fear-shaped visions.

Queen Guilt, on the other hand: Vague. Subtle. Manipulative. General. Incessant. Overbearing. Fearful. Anxious. Keeps you running in circles. Keeps you from moving forward. Keeps you from letting go. Offers you no forgiveness. Offers you no hope. Commands you to change but offers you no way to do it.

Annie, 1: Queen Guilt, 0. Ha.

A couple of nights ago I had a list of things that I needed to get done for work.

Now, listen so you know where I’m coming from: I grew up with a stay-at-home Mom. I always thought what I’d be is a stay-at-home Mom. And I am. I’m also, however, a freelance writer. I get to work from home. I do this because, to my surprise, I discovered that I go stir-crazy if I’m not doing something in addition to being a Mommy. That’s just me.

On this evening, I had a backlog and we were in between Internet services at home (don’t even get me started), which meant that I needed to escape to wifi-land for a few hours. Which meant that I needed to leave my Baby and my babies. At home. On the weekend. Without me.

I didn’t have a nice dinner made. I did have a backlog of laundry, a house dirty from our crazy weekend, and a husband who can handle all that stuff, all the kids, and all my paranoias just fine, thank you very much.

But guess what I still felt as I pulled out of the driveway? Yep. Guuuuuilty. No matter that I was going to work, not to have a manicure. Didn’t matter. Queen Guilt was on the scene and just chatting me up like her BFF.

And I let it go on, all the way to the parking lot, before I finally realized I wasn’t talking to myself. I was being talked to. I was being told what to feel, couched in a whole bunch of vaguely spiritual “good wife-good mom” terms that just punched my buttons.

But that’s when I realized this: if God had wanted me to stay at home that night, this is NOT how He would be telling me.

At that point, I punched a few buttons myself, ejected Queen Guilt from the sidecar, went in and got my work done and got back home. End of story, until the next time…

What’s Your Next Time?

We’ve all got hot buttons. You know you do, and chances are those might be areas in which God is calling you to change. But don’t confuse the voice of God for the voice of guilt. Guilt will keep you spinning in the same cobwebs. God will set you free.

Remember: it’s not a question of which voice is loudest. It’s a question of which one you listen to, which one you hear, which one gets your attention. And that part is up to you.

Here’s a recap:

Bad voices will appeal to your insecurity, pride, ego, flesh, fear, stress, mistakes, past, comfort, ease, desire for security, need to be right, need to be needed, need to fit in, need to be liked, fear of man, religious sensibilities.
Good voices will appeal to your morals, dreams, courage, humility, understanding, true confidence, sense of adventure, sense of risk, sense of purpose, deeper vision, long-term goals, sacrificial love, wisdom.

Bad voices will be urgent: do it now, do it now, do it now or else.
Good voices will be direct, specific, and consistent: this is the way, walk in it.

Who are you listening to?

Step 1: Ask a New Question

All those books out there talking about how to improve your life, meet your goals, and be your best self seem to have one thing in common (okay, really, more than one thing but that’s not the point here): they all direct you to spend some time thinking about what you really want out of life. You’re supposed to list goals and dreams and passions, find out what your purpose is, discover your calling, the thing that makes you tick.

I have a different proposal.

Quit asking, “What do I want?” and start asking, “What do I have?”
What’s right in front of you? Gazing at the horizon for opportunities? Try looking a little closer to home.
Wisdom is before him that hath understanding; but the eyes of a fool are on the ends of the earth. Proverbs 17:24

Step 2: Change One Thing

Quick quiz: what’s the one way not to change anything? Answer: try to change everything. Lots of people have great intentions and great ideas, but they spread themselves so thin that they can’t actually accomplish or change anything.

The few who do change are those who focus deliberately on success in one area at a time. Find one thing you need to change in your life and focus on that one single thing.

Step 3: Work in 3D

The 3 qualities that will make you outstanding in whatever you attempt? Simple. Easy. Anyone could be this way.

• Be diligent.
• Work daily.
• Fight off distraction.

That’s it. Really.

Step 4: Start Listening

Empathy is the ability to feel what other people are feeling. You want to be a good wife, a good mom, a good sister, daughter, friend, neighbor, church member. The problem is that all too often we get the needs, demands, requests of others through the filter of our own priorities and emotions. Instead of hearing the actual need, we hear our interpretation, so we then offer the right solution for that interpretation.

Example: Husband is frustrated at work. We think, “Oh, he’s just stressed from that fight he had with his boss, he’s not letting it out.” We offer: “Honey, you want to talk about….?” How often do we miss the real problem because we are busy offering a solution for our interpretation of the problem?

Be different. Be beyond status quo. Start listening to what people say and what they mean. Focus on their words, their emotions, the heart coming through. Open your eyes and ears. You will see the real problem and, God willing, you will be able to offer real help.

Step 5: Beat the Slog

Many, many people have great ideas. Sincere hearts. Motivation. Inspiration. Grand intentions. Good plans.

They even get off to a good start.
They stay consistent with their kids for 1, 2, 3 days at a time.
They quit arguing with their husbands for a week. Maybe even two.
They do great and then… they hit the slog.

First there’s the rush. It’s fueled by enthusiasm and emotion. You’ve worked yourself up into an energetic state about something, you’re motivated, and you take off running. Then, things don’t quite work out. It takes longer. You get tired. You question your motives. You question your plan. You feel like you are wading knee-deep in mud. You are in the slog.

If you keep going through the slog, you will be ahead of 99.9% of the people out there. The slog is where we separate “the ones who really mean it” from “the ones who don’t really care.” You mean it. I know you do. It’s in your heart. You care. Press on, one slow, gloppy step after another. You will get through the slog and you will find yourself further along than you anticipated.

Sharing what you have is more important than what you have. – Albert M Wells Jr.

When Annie approached me about participating in her Modern Homemaking REdefined series as a guest blogger, I was honored and excited, but also a little apprehensive. I loved the concept of finding the commonalities of women nurturing their homes and families in so many different walks of life. But, let’s face it. My lifestyle is pretty “common” as seeking commonalities goes. I’m a mother of three preschoolers who sends her kids to daycare while she goes to work at an office. Judging by the waiting lists on the daycare centers in my neck of the woods, that’s a pretty popular lifestyle choice.
So, as I was formulating thoughts about this essay and my approach to homemaking in 2010, all the same old ideas came to mind. Managing time, prioritizing schedules, getting dinner on the table, balancing work and the needs of children, getting to that 15th preschool party, figuring out what happens when the minivan needs to be serviced, determining exactly how many chicken nuggets can sustain one 5-year-old. Not necessarily ground-breaking and interesting stuff.

About ten minutes later, my boss of 16 years decided it was time to retire and close the advertising agency where I work. Yeah. Life has a way of making it interesting, doesn’t it? Over the course of a weekend, a conversation with the Queen of my current company, and some soul searching, I decided to take a trip down entrepreneur lane and start my own graphic design business. Presto, small business owner and work-at-home-mom all in one fell swoop! Can I have a moment, please?

Work opportunities change. Kids change. Schedules change. Choices change. Grocery prices change. Diapers and pull-ups change (constantly). Life in transition. Now there’s a commonality. As I started rethinking the new tenor of my life as a mom, designer, and homemaker as it crashes into the new title of business owner, this one fact began to rise to the surface. Change happens. It just does. We can resist it, but we can’t stop it. We can bemoan it, but we can’t squelch it. We can fear it, but we can’t insulate ourselves from it.

As I look at my life in the five years I’ve had my precious gifts (5yo, 3.5yo and just shy of 2yo), I see an endlessly flowing river of change. And, I see that each new stage of development and each new endeavor has brought frustration or worry, perhaps, but also joy and growth and the satisfaction of having made it through. I’m realizing that for me, modern homemaking is about embracing that life in transition. It’s about grabbing it and sucking the life from it, no matter how quickly it’s traveling. And come to think of it, the idea really isn’t all that modern. My grandmother did it and my mother did it through the constant changes of their times as well. Changing times and circumstances are certainly nothing new.

As mothers and homekeepers, however, it so often falls to us to make the most of those changes, those transitions that may be unique to our years and our families, but common among us nonetheless. I find myself striving in the midst of this inevitable change to create my own individual core consistencies– those things I want to remain constant about myself, about my home, about the quality of my children’s lives. In practicality, it’s about setting in motion the habits and schedules and even shortcuts that make that consistency possible, and about putting to rest the guilt to conform to some other Mom’s homemaking or parenting core requirements.

So what if Ore Ida or Tyson cuts my chicken and potatoes for me? At least I heard the continuing saga of rocket ships and sharks at the dinner table. So what if my kids find their way to bed some nights with sticky still on their cheeks. At least we found out how funny it is to drop your popsicle, pick it up again and pop it in your mouth, grit and all. So what if crumbs and dust bunnies live well and prosper under the couch? At least we know where all the spare Lincoln Logs and matchbox cars are stored. So what if all the lovely art objects have been relegated to the closet downstairs? At least we witnessed the coffee table tower-building feat of the century right up until the 2yo intervened. These are the core consistencies of what matters and what doesn’t. Nothing brings those constants front and center quite like change.

How will I respond to this new transition? How will it affect my home? My schedule? My ability to take care of my family financially, physically, emotionally? It’s easy to get lost or bogged down in this repeat-play in my mind. But, these are questions we all face–every day and with every shift in a thousand areas of life from jobs to marriages to gas prices to potty training.

For the past two years, I’ve chosen a posting “theme word” for the year that reflects something I want to pursue more carefully in my life. The 2010 theme word I determined back in December was “courage.” How could I have known that the events of this year would so strongly challenge that pursuit? Modern homemaking and homekeeping requires courage, to be sure. Courage in the face of change. Courage to pull from that change all the growing and teaching it has to offer. Courage to demand from that change the ability to keep what is worth keeping and release what isn’t. I hope that I can build from these transitions the courage to really live. To live in my own home, that place I’ve created. With my own benchmarks for success and my own set of constants. I hope we all can.

What do you need courage to let go of? What do you need courage to keep as part of your core?

Today’s 2 Cents Courtesy of:

Haley Mongtomery is a designer by trade, a creative type at heart and a mother in joy. She is the author of EyeJunkie, her personal foray into the art of paying attention — part mommy blog, part spiritual quest, part cultural record and part sarcastic word-play. When she’s not chasing three preschoolers, she’s usually writing sentence fragments or obsessing about life as the newly minted owner of Small Pond Graphics. You can follow her on Twitter: @itsasmallpond or @eyejunkie.

“Children are thoroughly human and if all their needs are provided for, with little effort on their parts they fall into habits of inertia and moral flabbiness as surely as their elders do under similar conditions. What we parents need to realize is that ordinary modern conditions more and more tend to put children in a passive, receptive mental attitude, and not in an active and masterful one; and further that we can not better this condition without taking a great deal of very intelligent thought” (1).

A lovely woman by the name of Dorothy Canfield Fisher wrote that back in 1916, which I personally didn’t realize was such a time of modern convenience. Comparative, I guess, to 1816 or thereabouts, I guess things had gotten significantly easier.
Wonder what she would have thought about video games? Talk about a passive, receptive mental attitude.

A Slight Dilemma?

But I take your point, Ms. Fisher, all goose-chasing aside. The point is even more relevant now, in 2010, almost a hundred years later. (Look at me, doing simple math all by myself!)
Thought 1: I am not going to revert to raising & killing my own chickens, washing clothes by hand, or hauling water by the bucketful in order to teach my children about work.
Thought 2: I am not willing to raise passive, lazy, good for nothings.

Work Is Good

Work (required, unpaid) should be a natural part of a child’s life. Work is part of the life of the family. Through doing work for and with the family, the child learns a few important points:

Point 1: There’s no such thing as a free lunch.

Well, really, that’s the baseline, isn’t it? “If a man shall not work, neither shall he eat” (2). Obviously it would be futile for us to expect our tender young dears to literally earn the money required to feed them. But it is not futile or unreasonable to expect a certain amount of work to be done by their cute little hands.

Point 2: Every member of the family is important.

Every member of the family is a contributor to the whole health, wealth, and happiness of the family. Work is the original self-esteem group therapy. When a child (yours, for instance, or mine) knows he really is helping, he feels wanted, needed, and valuable. Ta da! Instant self-esteem! When a child, however, sees that Mommy is working and Daddy is working and they are all too busy with work to be with him, he feels left out and unimportant. That’s why kids always want to help. They’re asking in their little way, Hey, how do I fit in here? If you’re doing the important work, how do I get in on that? I want to be important too.

Here are the things we parents must keep in mind:

Easy as Herding Cows Cats

Thing 1: Teaching your children to work when they are either a) very young and innocently incompetent or b) older and not used to working, thus annoyingly resentful, is about as easy as herding cats.

The young ones are eager, usually, but need instruction (over and over and over again) and help (over and over and over again) and show-me-how (over and over and over again) and practice (over and over and over again). And they’ll slow you down while they are tagging along to help out.
You have to think of training very young children to work as an investment. If you’d been smart enough to invest in Google way back when, you wouldn’t have gotten much of a return the first couple of years. But later, it would have paid off.

Um, You Might Have to Work, Too…

Thing 2: Monkey see, monkey do. If you’re lazy and spend every moment you can lounging around, that’ll be your kid, too. If you grumble and complain about going to your job or getting up early or having to do hard things, that’ll be your kid, too.

So Parent, train thyself! Self-discipline is necessary in order to be a good parent, the kind of self-discipline that you want to avoid, but that you need in large, painful doses.

And Now I’d Like to Introduce…Chores!

Back in my day (the first time legwarmers were in style), work which we’re talking about, the required and unpaid “part of the family” kind, was simply called chores. Heard of that? I bet you have. Bet you grew up with chores. Bet your parents told you stories about how much easier you had it, how their chores were much more difficult, never-ending, so on.

Before I go on, I’ve got a confession to make. I’m not really good at this with my kids, not on a consistent, thought-out basis.

I expect certain things from them, but I’m also half-obsessed with efficiency and so I often sweep in and do it for them. I “help” and hurry them along and that is not teaching them about work. That is teaching them about how to dawdle until Mommy gets so irritated that she does it for you. Kids are smart. They catch on.

So this is me, working out my work ethic for my children via the writing & posting process. (Did I mention I was obsessed with efficiency? I’m also knitting a sweater for Mara with my toes as I type… and listening to books on tape. And meditating.)

Why My Children Work

• Because work is part of life, a good and rewarding and necessary and unavoidable* part of life. Teaching my children about work from an early age builds in them a right attitude toward work, a good work ethic, and allows them to learn basic skills as they grow.
• Because work is part of family life. Having definite, regular work assigned to each child is a constant assurance of that child’s place in the family. Teaching and then expecting children to do their work responsibly is the clearest way of saying You are important and a valuable part of our family and we couldn’t do without you.
• Because I love to work. Don’t get me wrong, I love to get a massage or take a nap, too, but hands-down my favorite thing to do is accomplish something. Those words are the Balm of Gilead to my over-active little soul. So, since I want to have my children with me, and since it’s either entertain them and try to work at the same time or make the work the entertainment, they get to work too! Lucky kids.
• Because work, and the skills necessary to do the work, are helping my children become self-reliant, competent, and intelligent people who have a good idea of the world and what’s in it. I don’t expect my children to be rocket scientists by 15; but I do expect them to have common sense and a good stock of common knowledge. Work is a natural antidote to ignorance.

What Work Is, What Work Isn’t

What I do not mean by work is a bunch of arbitrary, unplanned tasks thrown at a child who needs discipline and/or attention. Children will be frustrated and resentful if you use work as a way to avoid them (both by obsessing over your work or giving them too much of their own). Children, like anyone, want to know that what they are doing actually matters.

Very very young children are a little different: my 2 year old likes to “tap” the boiled eggs as a help to me and his sister before we peel them. Kind of arbitrary, yes, doesn’t really matter, no. But he doesn’t get that yet. He will soon, and as a general rule of thumb I try to remember this: the older a child gets, the more important and challenging the work required of them should be.

A Few Points to Remember

• Work should be regular and definite, so there is a beginning and an end.
• Work should be taught, one task at a time. You should offer assistance or, at the least, verbal instruction and encouragement while a child masters a new task.
• Work should be established as a regular habit. You do your chores every morning, you clean up every night, etc. Make it routine and you’ll get less resistance.
• Work should come before play. This is a beautiful principle that every child should learn, the principle of deferred gratification. First you do your chores, then you get to go outside and play. First you make your bed, then you eat breakfast.
• Work should be the default way your child can earn extra privileges at home. I’m not saying kids should have to work for everything; it’s great to give and be a generous parent. Go for it. But don’t forget to give your child the chance to earn something he wants by the sweat of his brow. It will create more value than could ever be attached to a gift.
• Work should have an end. Yours, too. Teach your children, by example, to work hard and work well, and then teach them that there is also a time for rest and play. Don’t train them to find their identity in what they can accomplish by being a workaholic yourself. Praise them for how they work, for their attitude, for their effort, and for their character, not just for what they accomplished. And when it’s time to stop working, stop without guilt or regret or nagging or distraction and focus fully on the leisure time you have together.

*A few options do exist for avoiding work entirely, but most are unethical. Or stupid. Or irritating to the rest of the world. So just don’t go there.

References

1. Fisher, Dorothy Canfield. Self-Reliance. Pages 4 and 5.

2. 2 Thessalonians 3:10.

Images

1. Hardworking little woman courtesy of Vince Alongi on Flickr.