Some schools have their motto as, ‘hard work pays’. This is one thing that our father used to tell us when we were growing up. He used to wake us up at 6:00 am to do serious work before we could go to school at 7:30 am, and frankly, this made me hate waking up early. I would look at it as a punishment, little did I know that he was preparing us for the future.
As a grown up now, I find it easy to wake up do my personal or office work without coercion. This has helped me to appreciate those days but of course I can’t deny that I regret why I did not use that opportunity to start running my personal ventures then. Somehow, I look back and I see that our father did not clearly explain to us why we had to do what we did. The point was, unless you work, there is no school fees. We saw this as a violation of our rights because it was his “responsibility” to see that we study whether we worked or not.
I know some parents who keep saying that they can’t subject their children to work hard and suffer like the way they suffered in childhood. Children spend much of their time watching Tvs or sleeping. They can’t even help a housemaid in house chores. These are children who are above 15 years of age who can’t even wash their own clothes during holidays. During my time at the university, I know of a girl who used to pile up all her dirty clothes together and take them home during weekend to be washed. When she never went that weekend, she would wait for another weekend. It was cheaper to buy a new cloth than washing a dirty one.
Such are children that we may be raising in our homes who we think should not actively engage in a variety of household chores, but you forget that this person is soon getting out of your house and he/she has a life to live without you at one point. You may afford to do everything now for this person because s/he is in your direct control. But time will come when this person is married and has to fend for his/her own family. If this person was not used to work at home especially your daughter, she will marry and start cooking dry beans on a gas even when as a couple none of them is yet working. Before long, conflicts in the family will arise just because of the upbringing in a soft life which can’t be sustained and the negative attitude towards physical work.
Children should be taught hard work as a virtue and this should be implemented right away from childhood. They need to know the value of working just as you are also working hard so that they can live a happy life they are enjoying. When children learn how to work and they appreciate its value, they start to dream big. Work as their coach to see that they have all the skills of achieving what they put their hands on. King Solomon in his words of wisdom says “Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the realm of the dead, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom” (Ecclesiastes 9:10).
You can never expect your child to be very responsible in future when s/he has no quality of planning for her/his life which all begins with someone managing her/his simple tasks from childhood. Hard working people are likely to be very successful professionally and in business, are well determined and focused on what they would like to achieve in a given period of time. If they can work hard to pass exams at school, why can’t they use the same skills to perform certain tasks that will build them into better responsible adults?
The writer is a child advocate and a parenting coach based in Kampala.
