Maddi Gillel
Yes, you hafta !!!!! How many times have we as parents, heard this from our children when we ask them to clean their rooms, practice the piano, mow the lawn, take out the trash? This article is for you parents who need some encouragement to keep on and also to provide you some ammunition to tell these children.
There is a study by George and Caroline Valient of Harvard University regarding the value of work. They found that more than social class, family problems, or intelligence, a child’s willingness and capacity to work was the most important factor in predicting his or her mental health as an adult.
In “On Rekindling a Spirit of ‘Home Training’: A Mother’s Notes from the Front”: the following: “Without parents’ humanizing work, children may be quite smart, well-educated, and successful, but so selfish, self-centered, and uncaring as to be essentially uncivilized – not able to live in a spirit of community with others.”
I would think that the ‘humanizing’ in the above quote, would mean mom and dad making sure the chores are done every single day with few exceptions – and I know from personal experience, this takes a spine of steel and some swallowing. The crying, moaning, theatrics, and playing sick that ensue would cause the strongest among us to quit.
Here are some more great quotes:
“No man, who continues to add something to the material, intellectual, and moral well-being of the place in which he lives, is left long without proper reward.” – Booker T. Washington
“The more we do, the more we CAN do.” William Hazlitt
“A man who gives his children habits of industry provides for them better than by giving them a fortune.” – Richard Whately
“The gent who wakes up and finds himself a success, hasn’t been asleep.” – Wilson Mizner
“It is the height of absurdity to sow little but weeds in the first half of one’s lifetime and expect to harvest a valuable crop in the second half.” – Percy Johnson
“For anything worth having one must pay the price; and the price is always work, patience, love, self-sacrifice, – no paper currency, no promises to pay, but the gold of real service.” – John Burroughs
“No thoroughly occupied man was ever yet very miserable.” – Letitia Landon
“No man who is occupied in doing a very difficult thing, and doing it very well, ever loses his self-respect.” – George Bernard Shaw
“Chance favors the prepared mind.” – Louis Pasteur
“The fruit derived from labor is the sweetest of all pleasures.” – Lux de Clapiers
“The heights by great men reached and kept were not attained by sudden flight,
But they, while their companions slept, were toiling upward in the night.” – Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Sometimes I get so busy doing what is required of me as a wife, mom , and grandmother that I begin to think I’m drowning. Then I decide to go out in the yard and do some serious gardening or I decide to attack a cupboard, closet, or room that is out of control and it is a boon to my morale and my soul. I love work – good, physical, engaged work.
This seems to be a dying art. Children learn their work ethic (another topic) from their mothers – who are with them most of the day and who know what needs to be done and which child needs to be thusly engaged.
Thank goodness our mom understood this perfectly.