I grew up on a farm and we live on a farm. Not a hobby farm or an acreage but a working farm. My lineage of descent and my husband�s is that of farmers. So when I read about chores for kids in the parenting magazines at the dentist office and they list feeding the dog and taking out the trash. I snicker. Scraping hog floors didn�t make the list huh? When we grew up we worked hard. Physically hard. I had it easy because I had two brothers in my family to do most of the physical farm work. I made meals, cleaned the house, and froze my hands feeding bottle calves. I pulled out fence and rolled up barb wire. Feed the dog and take out the trash? That�s easy.

 

�I don�t want my child to grow up to do physical labor�. That�s not what I�m talking about, although the world needs ditch diggers too. What I�m talking about is character. Hard physical work builds character. Once you have done hard work, everything else is easy. If your children are truly working hard at a sport I believe they are learning character. However if they give up during a game or match and are pansies about getting pushed to exertion, then you have something to work on. Physical work builds character.

The Art and Science of Managing the Large Family

Large Family Logistics

Afternoon Chore Time

What do I mean by character? The ability to see beyond this second in time. To persevere beyond what feels good. It is one thing to read about character in a book and aspire to do that. It is another thing to practice it. Practicing character traits happens with work.

 

When my 10 year old complained about sweeping the kitchen floor every day I said, �You are going to get some pigs, and you will have to scrape hog floors. After that you will never complain about sweeping the kitchen again. Sweeping floors will be easy.� We bought pigs for a 4-H project, he had to feed, water, bed, and scrape their floor. He had to wash and groom them to show. He also made quite a bit of money and won some ribbons at the county fair as a bonus, but the point is that he built character in himself. Sweeping the floor became easy.

 

Put your children to work. Especially boys need physical work. Hopefully his hard work will contribute to the family. Chopping wood and tending the fire is excellent work for a young boy, even if it�s just for a campfire in the backyard. I don�t think you necessarily need to live on a farm in order for your children to learn work but by all means, find some physically taxing thing that will build a work ethic.

 

Learning discipline is being able to force yourself to do something, in spite of how you feel, over and over until it becomes a habit. This is a huge battle for those who did not have regular chores but it must be won. There is this thing historically called a �Christian work ethic� which seems to have been lost in the last couple of generations. We post-modernists think that we are too smart to work. Wrong.

 

It is important for our children to learn household habits at an early age. Our children will live in a house their whole lives. More than likely, they will be living with other people. They need to know the routines that need to happen in every household automatically. It should not be a huge taxing effort to know what it is they are to do next.

 

Just like brushing teeth before bed is a habit that you teach, you also need to teach them to spend a couple of minutes tidying their room. These kind of small routine tasks taught throughout the day to your children become ingrained and when they are grown they will carry them into whatever living circumstances they are in.

 

Why is this important? Plain and simple, not very many people in this world have personal maids to follow them around and pick up after them. When the mother does that for her children, she is in essence setting them up for life in a pigpen. She is training them to think that they are �above� work. They will grow up to think that the only work they can do is that what they have specifically educated for.

Building Character