Parenting in the Here and Now: Realizing the Strengths You Already Have by Lea Page

Author:Lea Page [Lea Page]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781782501848
Publisher: Floris Books
Published: 2015-01-15T00:00:00+00:00

Why Bother? Why chores are so important

If teaching your children to do chores sounds time-consuming to you, you are right. It is. All tasks take longer at this stage if you meaningfully include your children. You might wonder if it is worth teaching your child to do chores at all. It can be easier to do them ourselves. Some people hire someone to do them if they can afford it. What is there to lose? A lot, actually. Your investment of time right now will reap exponential rewards later, for you and your child.

Learning to do chores at an early age is essential to the development of a healthy will. This is entirely different from willfulness, where children are primarily concerned with resistance or getting their own way. A child with a healthy will expects that the needs of the day, including his, are the top priority, and he takes comfort in the certainty of this. Not only does he sense the rightness of this, but he is willing to put his abilities toward the task. The child has a sense of inevitability, of being buoyed along by the day’s events guided by you, the parent.

Your gentle guidance, day after day, builds a solid foundation upon which your child will develop his character. The base of that foundation is made of gratitude. If we look to cultivate any one quality in our young children, gratitude would be the place to start. Gratitude is the seed out of which love grows and flourishes – love for you and others close to your child, as well as those with whom he has only incidental contact: the bagger at the grocery store, the man who collects the trash, and the woman who drives the bus. Gratitude is the seed of love for all the living and inanimate beings that share his world: the sun and sky, the trees and rocks and birds. It is also the ground for self-esteem – for loving himself.

How is it that something as simple and mundane as picking up one’s towel or clearing one’s dishes can give rise to gratitude? It is because we must understand that we have been given gifts before we can feel grateful for them. It is not so much living in the cleanliness or orderliness that leads to gratitude as it is the realization of how much effort goes into the work of the day. It is having a sense of the hands that folded the pile of clean laundry waiting to be put away, that chopped and grated and rolled to create that plate of steaming enchiladas. Gratitude comes from a feeling of being welcomed into the greater current of life.

A child who does not pick up after himself, who does not learn to contribute and share in the daily work of his household, will have a fundamentally different view of the world than the child who is taught that he has a part to play, that he is relied upon as well as cherished.

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