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Our next topic regarding Parenting in Proverbs: diligent work.

The Proverbs are full of admonitions to work diligently and honestly and to avoid slothful laziness. It seems to me that diligent work was a more automatic thing to teach children when we lived in an agriculturally-based society. Kids grew up working hard to help contribute to the family’s financial success. They saw the immediate connections between hard work and profit and laziness and hunger. Our society has shifted to a much more entertainment centered culture where our goal is to work as little as possible and get what we want handed to us! We want everything to be easy, and if it’s not easy, it must be bad!

[Our society's obsession with working as little as possible and yet "deserving" to be helped out of our earned consequences is showing it's ugliness clearly in the school system. I enjoyed this teacher's response to a school district's new no-zero grading policy.]

Training our children to have diligence and work hard is vital to giving them the skills they need to prosper in relationships, finances, and be good stewards of what God entrusts to them. Consider the following:

10:4-5
Lazy hands make a man poor,
but diligent hands bring wealth.
He who gathers crops in summer is a wise son,
but he who sleeps during harvest is a disgraceful son.

12:11
He who works his land will have abundant food,
but he who chases fantasies lacks judgment.

13:4
The sluggard craves and gets nothing,
but the desires of the diligent are fully satisfied.

14:23
All hard work brings a profit,
but mere talk leads only to poverty.

18:9
One who is slack in his work
is brother to one who destroys.

19:15
Laziness brings on deep sleep,
and the shiftless man goes hungry.

20:4
A sluggard does not plow in season;
so at harvest time he looks but finds nothing.

These are certainly not all of the references – notably, a great “concrete” object lesson for kids [and adults!!] is found in 6:6-11, the “go to the ant, you sluggard” passage! Take them outside and literally watch the ants and talk about hard work!

There are some obvious ways to implement the teaching of diligent work with our kids. First of all, we can start teaching kids to contribute to the running of the home when they are small!

Now, to my fellow perfectionistic mothers, this is a struggle for us, isn’t it? When my 3 year old daughter announces that she is going to make her bed, why do I want to object deep down and tell her to “help me” rather than doing it herself? Who cares if her bed has big lumps in it? She can set the table… and I need to bite my tongue if the placemats are all wonky. ;) We’ll work on doing it well as she gets older, and in the meantime, there is value in her labor!

One thing I’m planning to do with her when she gets a wee bit older is to make a “photo chart” to put in her room of step-by-step how to clean her room with pictures of what it should look like. (Step one: books on the shelf like this, Step two: toys into bins, like this, etc.) To help kids learn to set the table correctly, you can make laminated placemats with outlines of the plate, flatware, and cup. Be creative, and get your kids involved in the housework – you’re teaching them diligence and also life skills!

Courtney has an easy and creative method for teaching her kids to do daily chores, and it’s fun, too!

When the kidlets are older, I am a big believer in allowance being connected to work. The Proverbs scream out to us that work is profitable, and that slothfulness will result in want. Kids learn early on whether or not they’re going to get what they want regardless of their behavior, and this can be a powerful aspect of developing character and diligence or laziness and a feeling of entitlement.

Another deeply impacting aspect of teaching diligence is modeling it, but I will save this for a second post. Apparently I’m feeling wordy today.

I am obviously still at the early, early stages of teaching these things to my kids. Do you have any methods you have tried or great ideas you have heard to implement principles of hard work and diligence? Do share!