Ideas For My Pocket: a Support Group for Families: A Family Perk, You Learn to Work!

It’s a great blessing of living in a family, to have to make it work. And it takes hard work from everyone! Children can learn early to feel good about the contribution they can make to the family.

I love the analogy of a family tandem bicycle. The “family bicycle” has as many seats as there are members of the family. Each person pedals to help the family to move forward and especially to get up hills. If any one member chooses to coast, the whole family is affected and can’t move forward nearly as effectively. If one puts on the brakes and quits, the family suffers tremendously. John Bytheway,“Tour de Family: Doing Your Part to Help Your Family Succeed.”

Ideas Families Have Tried:

1. Require work. Working together brings a different sort of family bonding. All work well-done brings contentment and fulfillment.

In the Martin home, parents do not pay for doing chores—they are part of living in a family. Each child knows that he has an important task to help the family run smoothly. So starting very young, each is required to do his chores daily. After dinner everyone is expected to chip in and do a part of the kitchen clean-up. In addition, there are family work projects: mowing lawns and trimming trees, picking up the toys together, painting a room of the house—with the little ones helping by removing electrical face plates.

If a child wants or needs to earn money, Tom and Sherice provide extra jobs—after regular chores are done: kids can sweep the porch, clean the fridge (Sherice loves it when they pick that one!), even clean toilets for a quarter each! Anyone can earn $5 by baking a batch of bread and needless to say, all the Martin’s can make bread! (In fact, several of the children have become better than Sherice at bread-making!).

The Hendrix boys began a trash barrel moving business when they were quite young for neighbors on vacation, then later on, they added yard work, cleaning pools, and irrigating. When Nicole Hendrix had a large high school choir tour to help pay for, she started a homemade pizza business. Every Friday and Saturday night she and a friend would make homemade pizza and deliver it to hungry, grateful neighbors. They learned a lot, and gleaned much business experience in the process and felt good paying their way to the costly tour that Spring.

2. Teach them to work.

I hate weeds! But I am thankful for them too! No matter how many you pick, there are always more to pick next time! My kids know that usually every Saturday there will be weeds to pick in the flowerbed or in the garden. We don’t have a farm that lives depend on to teach them the essential need for work; but we do have a pet or two and usually a flock of chickens that require constant attention in our hot Arizona sun or there are dire results! And always, there are weeds.

Saturday work is a part of their week from their earliest memories. It’s just what we do. We have to get ready for Sunday. Usually, the Saturday work consists of 1-- their regular weekly chores, only done more extensively on Saturday. For example, if the regular chores are taking out the garbage all week, on Saturday they rinse out a garbage, too . Of if they vacuum one room/day during the week, on Saturday they vacuum all of the front rooms. 2—Bedrooms must be cleaned on Saturday. 3—Clothes are washed or put away. 4—An extra job for Dad’s current project. And 5—don’t forget weeds! We may not have a farm to raise our kids on, but we do have plenty of weeds!

Weeding the garden does not require much skill; although we do have to teach which plants are not weeds and what will happen if the kids don’t get the root. But usually, while weeding we can talk. We can talk about a movie or a book or a school event or a favorite memory. This is a good opportunity to teach tolerance and understanding for the younger one who is trying every possible way to get out of the weeding and play instead. (“You used to be like that,” the fault-finding one is reminded!) There are so many lessons to learn from weeds! Especially to pick them early before they get huge and out of control and difficult to pick. Which is very much like changing our habits.

I’m not quite thankful for the morning glory that grow prolifically in one part of our yard, wrapping around the flowers or grapevines and squeezing the life out of them! But there are lessons to learn from them too! In fact, one Family Home Evening, since the weeds had gotten out of hand, we all went out to weed together. Each person was assigned to come up with a life’s lesson to learn from the weeds. It was amazing, the many and the variety of analogies the kids came up with. After this FHE full of work, we had an extra good Family Night treat!

3. Gradually expect more and more responsibility.

Young children will not just do their job well and regularly. They usually need mom or dad or an older sibling to work alongside them for awhile. Start early. Let them try the vacuuming while the vacuum is still interesting to them. Let them try sweeping when they can hardly hold a broom, if that is their interest. Praise good effort. Try to bond cheerful feelings with working as you do it together.

Marilee resigned herself that she would be feeding the family’s crop of chickens each day with her young son, Cory, when it was his turn to feed them. She knew it was tricky to reach in and change the water and to feed the squawking chickens while not letting them out. It was not her favorite thing to do, but she figured that Cory would be learning. And gradually, he could do more and more, and even devised ways to get it done easier. By summer, on days when she was extra busy and needed him to, he could do most of the job alone.

Each child has his own timeline on when he is ready to take on responsibility. As the child leads the way in taking more and more of the responsibility to get the job done well on his own, the better he feels about himself in the process. He will learn to be proud of a job well done.

4. Show them the family budget. Parents would do well to provide a family budget and a discussion about family finances.

Chip and DeeAnn found that if in Family Home Evening or Family Council, they spelled out the family income and spending plan, their children were more willing to turn up the A/C and use fans (or down and wear sweaters), to turn off lights, to conserve water, and to help out. The children were amazed at how expensive running a family was.

They use a two-week plan for groceries in which they save money by grocery shopping only every two weeks. They use the fresh stuff first and the frozen and food storage the second week. Chip and DeeAnn’s children laughingly call it “feast week” and “famine week.” But after seeing how much money the family’s food really cost, they supported the plan and waited for payday for “the good stuff” to be replenished. DeeAnn liked to have each child take a turn to cook. They had to plan ahead for ingredients, learn new skills, and were more willing to eat their concoctions! What’s more, they were more thankful for the food that the family could buy.

In the Paulson family, the father had been out of work for some time. The teenage boys, though they lived in an affluent area where kids had all kinds of toys provided, learned to pay their own way. What’s more, they started a family landscaping business. One of the boys even postponed his college for a year, helping get the family business off the ground before turning it over to his father. What fine young men these Paulson boys have become. Paying their own way and sacrificing for the good of the family built character.

5. Provide good explanations.

One time when I was stressed about many pressing duties, I was talking to my mother. Her advice to me was: “Have your kids help you.” If they understand, our children can and will help. They feel the responsibility to help the family if they are trusted with why things are difficult at present.

We need to provide explanations, and really talk over things with our kids. If we don’t want them to eat too much candy, we should teach why—that sugar robs their body of nutrients. If we don’t want them to play too many video games, we need to teach why, using the words of prophets that too much isolates them, dulls their minds, and ruins their concentration. If we don’t want so much contention, we need to teach the plan of salvation and our family's goal of living together in the top third of the Celestial Kingdom.

Every time we teach our kids to help out and why, we are bringing our family closer together as friends and helpers forever.

Ideas that worked well for you? I would love to hear your good idea or experience with this topic. Or your question. Ideasformypocketcomments@gmail.com.