Importance of Family Work

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Importance of Family Work

The Plan. After being a parent for over 24 years I wanted to assess and evaluate what worked and what didn’t when it came to teaching my children how to work in the family. I have long wondered why my children were so willing under some circumstances and uncooperative under others, and while I had a pretty good idea to the answers, a more refined definition was what I desired. I was motivated and intrigued by chapter 13 in Dollahite’s “Strengthening our Families” and decided to do further research regarding this subject.

I didn’t develop a love of hard work until I was a young mother in the late 70’s and was struggling to maintain my perfectionistic tendencies. I had the unrealistic expectation that I could maintain a tidy household continually and became compulsive about cleaning up after my children. This was not all bad. It gave me a real sense of satisfaction to view my efforts and I felt that my house was “next to Godliness” as it were. However, reality hit and I came to realize that a perfect house did not allow us to have a spiritual home and I changed the method to my madness by adopting a set of more realistic expectations that my young family could live with.

The Proclamation on the Family teaches, “Successful marriages are established and maintained on principles of … work…” President Hinkley stated, “Families working together are part of the antidote for societies worst ills”. We can deduct from these statements that family work is sure to bless our lives and when we understand that it is given to bring us together we also see that it has divine promise. We must “kneel humbly before our creator and admit that we lack wisdom to find our way” (Dollahite, 183). As we pray for guidance we will come to realize that our homes can’t be run like a business where “money guides much of our thinking” (184). Our goals need to help children recognize and respond to need and teach them to share responsibility with the rest of the family (186). When we see the spiritual purpose in our work, we begin to see what the Lord had in mind when he told Adam and Eve they would labor by the sweat of their brow all the days of their lives.

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