Working as a Family

The publication Seeing the Everday had a fabulous feature on the importance of working with your children. One of my fondest memories growing is up is spending time with my father every Saturday morning working together as a family and then playing together as a family in the afternoon. He took time every single Saturday morning to help us come together as a family and teach us the joy of working together.

Here are some wonderful things I learned from the article “Families Work” by Kathleen Slaugh Bahr and Cheri A. Loveless:

~Exemplifying the Attitudes We Want Our Children to Have: They talk about the importance of honoring family work so our children will feel the same way about it.

~Refusing Technology That Interferes With Togetherness: Think about what you will lose (the joy of chopping vegetables together, talking while hand-drying dishes, etc.) with modern technology.

~Insisting Gently That Children Help: They talk about the temptation in our busy lives to do all the work ourselves and also the temptation to give children only jobs to clean up the messes they’ve made. “When you structure work this way you can shortchange yourself by minimizing the potential for growing together which comes from doing the work for and with each other.”

~Avoiding a Business Mentality at Home: We can over organize and get caught in the trap that children cannot work without motivation, supervision or receiving a payment. They say, “Rather, family work should be directed with the wisdom of a mentor who knows intimately both the task and the student, who appreciates both the limits and possibilities of any given moment.”

I have never thought of family work in this light, have you?

What have you learned from their points?