Every year when the breezes start to warm up and the rains start to sprinkle, I get this sudden urge to do… anything. Something! It’s as if winter’s hibernation loses it’s grip over me and spring beckons with a nice warm shower. I step out the door into the brisk cool air with a sense of freshness and energy. Fully-rested, I’m ready to take on the tasks of life with vivacious spirit.
As my list of to-do’s grows longer, the weather warms and winter schooltime gives way to spring schooltime which means less writing and more doing. Pencils are replaced with twigs and sticks. Dirt takes the place of notebook paper. Bugs and flowers become flash cards. A new kind of school emerges – the school of life.
This year we have some pretty hefty tasks to undertake. After gorging on wii and movies all winter, the entire family is ready for it – even our resident gamer. Our garden supplies arrived a couple weeks back for the seven raised beds we’re putting in to grow our own vegetables and herbs. We’re all filled with excitement to get out there and get going. So far, we’ve managed to get three of the beds built and in place. Sickness and weather seem to be delaying us but I’m taking this as God’s divine cue to wait because he wants it to be perfect. : )
As I get older mature, I realize the goodness of so many things our society in recent years has balked at. One-room schooling, for instance. If you didn’t ‘get it’ you didn’t advance to the next grade. You could be doing 5th grade arithmetic and 3rd grade reading. But you learned it. There was much less worry about your delicate feelings and much more concern for your understanding! We’ve created a bunch of wimps in this society by protecting everyone from everything that might make them have to feel like they should try harder in life. God forbid our kids learn to work at anything!
Speaking of work… schooling through the winter just so kids can be home to help with survival – not vacation – through the summer and harvest is a wonderful growing, maturing experience we have completely denied our kids. We’ve managed to teach our kids that we should work for money so we can do nothing. What I mean is that we’ve taught our children to believe we ‘make a living’ so we can enjoy life. In times past, we enjoyed the work of living. Do you see the difference? We tell ourselves (and our children) that in order to find joy in life, we must be doing things with no value – recreation, fun for the fun of it. No other end. We work hard (or really, we try to do as little as possible and just get away with it), not enjoying the work at all because it’s not what we’ve been told is the ‘fun stuff’ to do. We don’t do it, to do it well – to glorify God. We just work to get money so we can go do the things that we want to find our joy in. So essentially, we spend most of our lifetime doing things we don’t like so we can spend a tiny bit of it doing nothing, which brings us happiness. Absurd??? Helloooo?? We end up hating life because we can’t be constantly doing ‘fun’ things.
We’ve become haters of hard work and we’ve taught our kids to hate it as well. If you don’t have a farm for your kids to help take care of this summer, find some type of work for them to do. Let them start a summer business. YOU start a summer business and have them help! Give them some big responsibilities and allow them the enjoyment that comes from accomplishment. You will love the rewards. They will thank you for it fifteen years from now when they have a great work ethic established and they’re employer will kiss your feet for it!
Seriously, though, we can build a great sense of worth in our children just by giving them work to do and letting them do it. Sometimes letting them do it will entail a swift kick in the pants out the door at dawn, but that too will be a blessing to them later in life.
Someone will surely think I mean that you should be mean, hateful and abusive to your children so you can get them to do all the work around the house. I’m asking you now, don’t waste my time and yours twisting my words here. On the contrary, being a parent who will lovingly, respectfully encourage and push a child to heights he didn’t think he could accomplish is a sweet gift to a growing child.
Train your boys to be men, providers, hard workers. Train your girls to be efficient, knowledgeable, helpful women. But realize in order to do this, you must be this yourself.
Chew on this for a while. I’d love to know what you’re doing this summer…
-Sara O’