In fact, their "help" is so totally useless that very often, mothers throw in the towel, chase the kids outside (or to the playroom) and roll up their sleeves.... because let's face it. No one really needs the extra work of scrubbing dishsoap off the floor, dough out of a drawer, laundry soap off the laundry baskets, re-sorting laundry hampers and drawers, re-arranging books on the shelf, or picking up pieces of broken plate or glass. In fact, the idea of taking the time to teach our kids to help is just......crazy.
You really want me to ADD to my eight-page to do list? And come on, isn't it better for their longterm health and welfare if I DON'T have to explain to them for the seventeen thousandth time why we WASH our hands first BEFORE drying them on the dishtowel, because I'm pretty sure my patience is wearing thin.....
Simcha's solution was to say that eventually, it would all be over and she would have a nice clean house. No peanut butter on the carpet, no piles of rocks in the bottom of the washing machine.
She ended her post by saying: "one day they will be gone and it will be amazing."
I love that she ended it that way.... I am one of those people who thinks that everything has its season and that we should enjoy and do our best with what's right in front of us.
I feel sad for women who are not ALSO preparing to have an empty nest one day (ie. who give EVERYTHING to the kids but don't save some things for their marriage/personal journey), but I also feel sad for women who are anxiously awaiting it (not that Simcha is!) because I worry that they may be missing out on the blessing of having the kids there in the first place.
Me? I have a different outlook. (And this may be because I have what I call inexperiential optimism... my family is still young-- Simcha has nine kids and I only have three so far.)
The helpers question is fair. It's confusing knowing they need to be helping, but also knowing our houses will never be put together unless we do it ourselves. I have friends who recommend any number of solutions, from sacrificing the extra space to have a playroom the kids stay in, to staying up once a week until early morning and getting the cleaning done while the babes are sleeping. I even know women who work part time JUST so they can hire a cleaning lady once a week.
It's hard knowing the right thing to do-- And knowing that ultimately, we will run ourselves into an early grave keeping legos off the floor and dust bunnies out of the corner if we don't enlist some kind of help. For some families, that means enlisting a maid or au père. For others, a parent or friend. But the question is-- how will we raise up children who don't collapse under the pressure themselves when their own kids are leaving lizards wrapped in tissue paper in the fridge and making floor paint out of diaper cream?
At the CLAA, we are encouraged to make our schedules about work and prayer, and you better believe that means that whatever times our kids are not spending agonizing over memory work at this stage they are basically just.... working. (I've retained a few Charlotte Mason elements I will not part with, such as the Nature Study, to give them time to do some "wonder and explore" stuff...but I'm still completely on board with the CLAA idea of "training" kids to work.)
Yes, you read that right-- the CLAA has some "lifestyle" recommendations to assist homeschooling families in using the curriculum... often made available through the forum in which you get a general sense of the way William Michael thinks a "good" household is run. The reason? It's the founder's belief-- and I hope you understand I am not speaking for him, only paraphrasing from what I understand -- that most families who don't succeed at homeschooling don't succeed for two reasons. The FIRST is that they fail to provide the type of Christian family culture which will ultimately train a child to work, study, and live right, thus the children fail. The second is because the curriculum choices out there are inferior to the classical model. In other words, most CLAAers believe it's better to see a family homeschool using a curriculum other than the CLAA and yet DOING THE WORK of raising the family according to Christian standards of behavior and ethics than to see a family enrolled in CLAA and not doing the work it requires to educate their children in OTHER (non-academic) departments.
Now, the work ethic is the result, but the foundation is prayer, and for that reason the CLAA has requirements about religious life too. In fact, you might be interested to know that CLAA families are recommended to sacrifice a room in their home too.... not for a playroom to occupy the kids, but for a family chapel. And we LOVE the idea. Work and Prayer make for an incredible rhythm in the day-- for perfect peace, even, because as you will soon see if you implement this rule, peace begins to reign. But it is not easy, and as Simcha so perfectly pointed out, training children to help is..... rather painful.
Because we spend so much time on that in the CLAA, I have become hyper sensitive (yes, in just three short weeks!) to all the excuses I hear about NOT getting to work outside of the CLAA.
It seems that in our culture, all we ever do is make excuses for NOT doing the hard stuff... and that hard stuff includes teaching our kids-- training them-- to work. In the three weeks I've been REALLY paying attention, I've noticed that the reasons I don't do it when I don't is either sheer laziness (I don't want to deal with the mess/meltdown/bad attitudes/excess of noise etc) OR sheer selfishness (I don't want them to do it because I want to do it the way I want to do it.)
It's fighting that urge to protect myself/my stuff/my time etc. that causes me to stop, take a deep breath, and say: (sometimes for the eight hundredth time) "Here, honey, let me show you."
So this week, whenever I was tempted to quickly do a mama-tornado through their bedroom because there were books scattered on the floor or their beds weren't made, I would take a deep breath and start to TEACH them.
Yes, it took two weeks of really forcing them to do the work before they got into a routine of actually DOING it. And you should know that in my house, my kids already do a pretty good amount of work compared to what I see their peers doing, so that should tell you that the things I'm learning in the CLAA are definitely a higher end commitment. The goal over there is nothing short of sainthood. And that means no shortcuts, just straight up obedience to our daily duty. (which, btw, doesn't necessarily mean you must figure out how to get all the work done between yourself and the kids. There is a time and place for outside help.... remember.... all things, in moderation.)
For the first time in my life, though... I'm seeing how disobedient I have been instead of patting myself on the back because my kids say please and thank you, or because they know how to put their shoes away when they come in the door.
What I like about is that this is MAMA training, and not just kid training... and the end result of that is that I'm focused on how much harder I need to work, and reminded of how I'm leading them, not just how THEY are doing. The whole family is making progress, and dad will too so long as he is involved in the process (in the CLAA, dads are hyper encouraged to be in leadership positions in the family homeschool.)
So when my five year old hits her brother and says: "that's what YOU GET for taking my sponge out of my hand," I'm reminded to lose my OWN sassy attitude when she comes crying to me... how many times have I rolled my eyes, raised my voice and grunted: "And that's what you get for not paying attention!"or some other such smartalec response??
Now I know to tell her, with great patience and care: "I love you, my dear, and I"m sorry you got hurt. Next time you'll remember to pay close attention, won't you?" And then I can wink at my husband the next time we proudly listen to her say those very words to her little brother, who grabbed the sponge out of her hand again and slammed his hand into the wall in the process. :)
I should note here one more thing. I have noticed, in these three weeks also, that associations have made huge differences, both in myself and in my children, both good, and bad. When my children have played with other children who were not helpful, they came home ungrateful, rude, and challenging. When I myself have been around other mothers who are not helpful, I came home lazy, selfish, and nagging/screechy. One more reason that there is great wisdom in keeping a close eye on the effects of one's associations. And praying much, without which we will never make it.
Ironically, just as I finished writing this blog, my husband came home with a car load of groceries to put away. Ordinarily, I chase the kids out of the kitchen and put things away myself, but when my three year old started begging to help I thought... well, I'd be a hypocrite if I said "no." So I rolled up my sleeves and took a step back, letting him and his five year old sister take over. I watched them dance about the kitchen, taking food out of the bags and organizing it by style on the countertops as they had seen me do endless times. They got out stools and partnered up to reach the really high spots. From time to time, they asked me to help them.... does this go in this drawer or right here? and mamma, can you make a little more room on this shelf for me to put this? I can't reach up there.
I laughed as my five year old explained the freezer to my three year old: No, the little one on top is the freezer, but mommy says that is backwards. She doesn't want all of Grandpa's stuff in the way in there, so she wants the big one to be the freezer and the little one to be the refrigerator. She says Americans just don't get it. Put it there, in the REAL freezer.
And then, just like that, they were done. I sucked in my breath.... Sure the nutrigrain bars were on top of the rice bags instead of underneath, and the olive packets weren't neatly stacked like I like them. But the food was put away.... All of it. And it was done RIGHT! And they had had fun doing it. And I wasn't cleaning milk off the ground. Amazing.
Here, now, is a list of recommendations I have for those who read Simcha's article and thought.... "EXACTLY!" but still wanted to do some thing more to make it work in their house instead of just throwing their hands up and having a good giggle.
Because it really can work! I do see families often in which the children, even the youngest, HELP around the house. And where peace reigns.
1. Make a schedule/routine. STICK TO IT, day in and day out.
2. be flexible if you need. (haha, you like that? I told you-- moderation!)
3. Don't take a break from parenting. Use every teachable moment.
4. Watch who you are with and check yourself often.
5. Create jobs. If kids are young , ANYTHING can be a job. Polishing doorknobs. Organizing grapes. Re-stringing rosaries. Gathering leaves. Etc. Take a cue from Army Basic Training, where I once spent an entire day gathering pine cones into plastic bags, then moving them halfway across a field and "arranging them in an esthetically pleasing manner." That was followed by a half day of moving sandbags from one side of a company area to another.
6. Have standards. No, you cant go out and play unless your bed is made, your clothes are hanging, and your books are neatly stacked. Etc. EVEN THOUGH it's playtime in the schedule.
7. Do community service projects TOGETHER.
8. Take a hint from Charlotte Mason, who suggests noticing your children's bad habits and replacing them with GOOD habits, one at a time, consistently.
9. If something is really wrong-- check yourself before being too hard on your child.
10. Smile a lot, and engage them in conversation that uplifts as you work.
Here are some pictures, old and new, of ways in which we have trained/are training our kiddos to be helpers/participators in the home. Some of them include play/dress up, but I'm including them because they are for a purpose-- teaching them about their roles to help.
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