I love this picture! The first thing I saw was a family that's having a great time playing together. In and of itself, that is a wonderful sight to behold. But, take a closer look. Dad has a bucket and there are towels on the hood of the car and on the ground. A deeper analysis of this picture is not a family playing together but a family enjoying working together. In my interpretation of this picture, the family was washing the car when a water fight broke out.
Family work can be fun? Now that's inspiring!
Something that impressed me when learning about family work is that it is best done together. Together meaning at the same time and within sight (or close earshot) of each other. In this day and age, we are often so busy that family chores have become a dreadfully isolating event that each family member individually tries to get through as quickly as possible. Unfortunately, this is considered the "ideal" situation. Many families have husbands and children who are merely beneficiaries of homemaking and chores, not contributors.
So, how do you get your children to help with family chores? Though I have not studied the developmental stages of children in any great depth, having teens and young adults of my own, I have developed a sense of how children are motivated at different stages. I'm no expert, but here's what I know about how kids think. First, they will do anything for you. Next, they will do anything for treats and toys. Eventually, they'll do anything to be left alone. Finally, they'll do as little as possible while still maintaining access to their phone and a car. That's it. Tina's four developmental stages of motivation for children. It's not super scientific, but deep down I think we all know it's true. I'm not saying that children are bad. They just don't have a motivational aspect to their personalities that extend beyond their own desires until they're older.
Additionally, somewhere during the second or third phase, they learn the word "fair". Once this word has been discovered, children tend to spend and an inordinate amount of time determining which things are not. It's mystifying to me how all (first world) children universally define fairness the same way. Which, of course, is completely and narcissistically wrong. In essence, children define fairness as nothing unpleasant ever happening to them, getting everything they ask for, and never having to do anything that helps someone else - ever. Self-care chores like cleaning their own rooms or doing their own laundry are only fair in a technical sense but still, somehow, morally wrong. Also, the only requirement for fairness of desireable things, is that no one gets more than them. Others getting less is fine. I can't define this as a stage because this thought process seems to have no definable universal beginning and in many cases no end whatsoever. Our society as a whole needs to better understand the difference between what's unfair and what's unfortunate. But, that's a topic for a whole other blog.
Bless our little one's precious underdeveloped brains. We love them anyway, don't we? Here's what's important to know. Fairness to children (and some adults) is often a visual thing. If they see someone eating a cupcake, they should get one too. If they have to clean the bathroom, their siblings should have equally unpleasant tasks and have to do them at the same time. This is great news for you! You can use their sense of fairness to get them to help out, And who knows, they may even look back (many, many years down the road) and be grateful for it.
This has worked for many generations before ours. Historically, family work has not only been done side by side but at a slower more patient pace. A father would take all the time he needed to teach his sons how to properly care for a garden. A mother would spend days, months, or years teaching her daughters how to create wholesome meals from scratch. This type of time and patience cultivated a family bond that drew a family together. Today, men leave and go to work and children go to school, leaving the mother with all the responsibility for caring for the home. Couple that with the fact that women often work these days too, and there isn't much time left for achieving the ever-increasing standards of cleanliness, interior design, and organization a "normal" home should maintain. Rather than an essential training element, isolationist home-making has become one of the many distractions from effective parenthood.
I tried something new in my family and it worked like a charm. Keep in mind that my children are older, so I recommend adapting your strategy to how each of your children sees the world and their particular motivational stage and needs.
My youngest has no concept of urgency and only a visual sense of fairness. So, if everyone is working and she has been asked to help, she will grudgingly help. In the past, when I have asked her to help, and she doesn't see anyone else working, she "gets distracted and forgets". You know this move, don't you? The work doesn't get done because she
literally sees it as unfair. Working together is easier for my teen because she cannot argue that she is unfairly burdened. My young adults have passed this phase and just want to get it done so they can go do what they want. They work fulltime so their personal time is precious. They also have more of a sense of adult responsibility and will work alone if asked, but of course, they hate it and still think it's unfair. Understandable; their little sister is getting away with procrastinating until everyone forgets that anything was asked of her, or someone else does her job.
So, here's how the experiment worked. After dinner, and before anyone was able to get involved in doing something else, I declared a family work session. We all spent a few minutes cleaning the shared areas of the house. I washed the dishes, my husband cleaned the bathroom, and the kids worked within sight of each other tidying the dining room and living room. It was done in a matter of minutes and I was relieved and happy that things were clean-ish. They were happy that it was over and could get back to more important matters (video games and whatnot).
The point is, I used their individual motivations as leverage to help them encourage each other. All of my children were satisfied that the work was evenly distributed. My husband and I were elated that it was done at the time it was asked. The older kids were glad it was done quickly. This may not work as well with small children with different motivations, but if you spend a little time trying to figure out what is most important to them, you can figure out a way to combine each child's motivations against them. . . er. . . I mean, to help each other out while whistling a happy tune!
The Family: A Proclamation to the World, states that successful families are built on (among other things) work and wholesome recreational activities. It seems impossible to ever get caught up around the house so that we can actually spend some time together relaxing as a family. But, I think that is exactly the point. It is precisely the things that require sacrifice, effort, and dedication that signal to our brains that something is important, worthwhile and worthy of our time and attention.
For many of us, it's difficult to imagine taking time away to do something fun with our families when we always feel the pressure that we are falling behind. Federal holidays are usually the big winners here because it's the most likely time that nobody has to be anywhere or do anything for someone outside our own homes. But doesn't our family need to do things together more than five times a year? Of course! Also, let's be honest, we've all made Labor Day a federal "clean the garage day" before, am I right?
Naturally, we don't need to plan an entire day, weekend or even a two-week vacation in order to spend time together. But, we should absolutely take the trouble to intentionally do things together as families on a regular basis. Think of the memories you have of spending time with your family as a child. While the big events like Thanksgiving and Christmas often blur together, we remember very clearly that time we went camping and it rained all night while we stayed up and told stories. We remember going to the ocean and rolling down the sand dunes like a log. We remember visiting our cousins and getting sunburned because we played out on the trampoline too long. It may seem frivolous or even unwise to drop all the responsibilities of home to go play with our families. But, as I've gotten older, I've realized that I spent way too much time worrying about what my house looked like and how far behind I was, and not nearly enough time leaving it to go play with my kids.
Women are just as susceptible to falling victim to the old adage, that no one ever laid on their death bed wishing they had spent more time at work. If you wait until you're "caught up" before you plan family time, you will never have family time. Leave the laundry and go play!
How do you recreate as a family? How have you taught your children the value of work? Share your experiences if you have overcome the perfectionist tendency to do all the work yourself or to neglect fun for all the busyness around you.
Hawkins, A., Dollahite, D., & Draper, T. (2012). Successful Marriages and Families: Proclamation Principles and Research Perspectives. Provo, Utah: BYU Studies.
