How do we get our kids to develop a good work ethic when we don’t live on a farm? This is a question have repeatedly asked myself for years. Honestly I bring it up a lot in the hopes that my dream for a small farm will get pushed into reality, but I digress. I genuinely wanted to know: “how do I teach my kids to become hard workers, when the work isn’t that hard, and it tends not to take all day?” Are you an in-betweener like me? We don’t live in the city, where we could find every conceivable excuse to go here and there in busyness, and while we do live in the “country”, we do not have any livestock, or chickens, or even a garden (yet). So what gives? What do we do when we can’t afford to, or have space for productivity in the ways that we see a lot of homeschool families do? What if we’re a one-car family, and sending my kids to a local farm to get some work experience isn’t an option? You get the point. These are real questions that I have, and sometimes still struggle with.
I have joked in the past that I will have to keep dirtying dishes on purpose, and have the kids bake until we run out of groceries, in order to set their hands to work. I am thankful to say that I have not had to do this. It is amazing, how a day fills up when we “get things done”. After one full day of productivity, we are all grateful to sit together in the living room and read, or watch a movie. The work ethic, is not equal to the work experience. A boy who grows up on a farm may have excellent experience in shoveling out stalls and gathering eggs, and a boy who grows up in the suburbs might have excellent experience in vacuuming and washing dishes. But if either boy approaches his work with a lazy or apathetic attitude, then the experience has done little for him. The heart is always the heart of the issue. I recently had this conversation with one of my children. Their concern was, because a certain subject was a struggle for them, and the other students weren’t struggling, they must be a poor student. But what they needed to understand was that their education, if approached with a willingness to learn, and their best effort is given, and their work is completed to the best of their ability, then they have succeeded. Work ethic is by definition the moral standard of work. A woodworker who turns a toothpick is not less of a worker than a woodworker who turns a bowl. But if the toothpicks are terrible due to a lack of effort, then the result is not only material failure, but moral failure as well. It is not always what we work, but how we work. If our children can approach a job, no matter the size, willingly, and work to the glory of God, then they are developing good work ethic.
Sometimes my dishes are not washed well. Sometimes the wood is not stacked neatly. We won’t talk about the state of the bureau drawers. But you get what I’m saying. Be encouraged, that if your life is not the “homeschooling mom of forty nine kids on five million acres," you have just as much to work with. And when you run out of ideas, you can always check the baseboards. To work!