Teaching Children the Joy of Work

Simple responsibilities prepare children to take on greater responsibilities as they get older. Maria Sbytova/Shutterstock

For the third time, you start unloading the dishwasher. A few more plates find their home in the cupboard before the cries of the toddler in the other room shatter the silent sanctuary you foolishly attempted to construct. Again.

You hurry to the adjoining room. His tower of blocks has again betrayed him with diabolical malfeasance, collapsing into hopeless ruin—much like your hopes of completing any housework. What to do?

Scenarios like this are familiar to every parent. One of the joys of small children is their desire to spend time with you—their yearning for your attention, reassurance, and love. The challenge arises when other things also demand your attention: the dirty dishes, the car’s oil filter, the overgrown yard, the laundry strewn down the hallway.

It’s not always possible to reconcile these competing demands, but one oft-overlooked strategy to harmonize them lies in incorporating your children into your work routine as much as possible. Creative thinking can combine Junior’s need for attention with the need to complete household tasks by involving Junior in your work.

In addition to helping you get more done, this strategy instructs children from an early age about the joys of meaningful work and helps them develop a strong work ethic. Plus, most children love to feel like they’re doing something important and useful.

Little Kids in a Big World

When kids help with tasks around the house, they learn how to contribute value to their community. Biba Kayewich

Oftentimes, we struggle to mold the adult world around our children’s world, accommodating their needs and desires and putting adult tasks on the back burner. Sometimes that’s necessary. But in the long run, children need to learn to adjust to the adult world that they’ll one day live in and contribute to. Why not begin early, in an age-appropriate manner? Integrating kids into household work in a fun and creative manner is one way to accomplish this.

As psychologist Laurie Hollman wrote: “We all want our kids to share in household chores, make their beds, carry their plates to the sink, pick up towels off the floor, and have organized backpacks. It gives us fewer tasks, but more importantly, we are teaching the value of shared collaborative work. Teaching a work ethic starts early.”

What does this look like concretely at the youngest ages? Let me provide an example from my own experience. From a very early age, my 2-year-old daughter was interested in the dishwasher. Whenever we opened it, she wanted to clamber up onto the open door and pull things out. Now that she’s old enough to understand basic instructions, my wife has transformed this ritual into a game that helps instead of hinders her work.

She takes the silverware tray out of the drawer and sets it on the floor. Then she tells our daughter to take the clean silverware from the dishwasher and put it away in the appropriate slots of the silverware tray (non-sharp items only, of course).

Our daughter eagerly matches the forks and spoons from the dishwasher with the ones in the tray, sorting everything and placing it in the right spot. My wife has created a free, DIY toddler matching game that speeds up the dishwashing process instead of impeding it. Moreover, she’s teaching our daughter that she plays a role in the functioning of our home. Our daughter will learn that we expect her to take on responsibilities that will grow with her age.

Another incident: I recently felled a dead tree on my property. Cutting down a tree and chopping it up for firewood leaves behind a lot of sticks, twigs, and bark in the grass. Clean-up can take a lot of time. Rather than leaving the toddler with my wife so I could pick things up, I brought her out with me and explained what we needed to do: pick up twigs and put them in the wagon. She grasped the idea well enough and relished bobbing around in the yard and gathering little bits of wood and bark to throw in the wagon. She especially enjoyed “pushing” the wagon while I pulled it to the pile of kindling.

Did my daughter’s help drastically shrink the time it took to clean up the yard? No. But it certainly didn’t slow me down, and, more importantly, it taught her that she has a role to play—albeit a very small one—in the world of adult work, in completing useful tasks. It taught her that we can bond over work, not just play, and that the human lot of earning bread “by the sweat of your brow” can be an enjoyable, meaningful, and unifying reality. It was a small example, but we can continue to build on such experiences as she grows.

Children can take on more and more significant roles within the household as they age. If they started with simple tasks as toddlers, then by the time they’re tweens, they can reasonably be expected to help out with everything from cooking to cleaning to car maintenance to lawn mowing to home repair to animal care.

Work Is Purposeful

In addition to experiencing the meaningfulness of contributing to something larger than themselves, they’ll also learn the hard fact that we have to work for things in life. According to an article by Hammond Psychology & Associates: “It’s important to impress upon our children that nothing in life is actually free. ... Therefore, teaching children this as early on as possible can help instill in them a solid work ethic. For some parents this will look like requiring them to do chores to ‘earn’ play time. ... Here’s an example that I’ve heard many times over: You must do your homework before you can play video games. Believe it or not, this is a great way to instill a positive work ethic in your children.”

The overall maturation of a child can be fostered by age-appropriate household responsibilities. This is because maturation consists, largely, in embracing responsibility. As with any human virtue, that capacity is built up slowly and incrementally over time, by repeated actions that form habits. We have to start small and build from there.

Young adults will struggle to embrace the responsibility of starting and caring for their own families if they haven’t first cared for their younger siblings, animals, or at least some aspect of the smooth running of a household. They can’t be expected to take on even those responsibilities if they haven’t first learned to care for their own bedrooms, make their own beds, clean up their own messes, and the like. Even those tasks will come easier if they’ve succeeded at simpler tasks such as sorting silverware or picking up sticks. Along with preparing children for life, these simple practices will enhance their sense of self-worth and agency.

The feeling of success that children experience from accomplishing an assigned task sets them on a positive life trajectory, according to Hollman. “When kids feel successful when they are two or three, it becomes a way of life. Even a two-year-old can pick up a towel off the bathroom floor and be thanked for the help. Don’t forget the thanks!” she wrote.

Note that I’m not suggesting that children should “raise themselves” or be weighed down by excessive responsibilities that really belong to their parents. Their parents must care for them, not the other way around. Instead, I’m suggesting that children of all ages can participate in their own care and the care of the home as a whole, and that participation should increase over time as a way to prepare for adulthood.