Hi fellow Edders,
Today I wanted to share the important lesson we taught our son recently: work!
Early Working Lessons
My wife and I have thankfully been able to do what I think is a decent job raising the little man. Granted we are a bit more "helicopter" parents than some, meaning that we are closer to him than other parents so we can guide him a little bit but not too strongly. It's turned out well and he's well behaved compared to some of the other hellions I've seen around. I digress on that part though.. lol
One of the recent lessons we started to try and teach him to a greater extent, is the need to work for things that you want! The little man has been pretty good thus far with helping us out around the house in exchange for some money. We pay him to do some cleaning and he does a decent job of doing it, and it depends on what he's aiming at whether he's looking for work often or not. He certainly was looking for some work recently! Lol
The little man has always been interested in outdoor things and I am very thankful for that, because it benefits me as well! It gets me outside as well as my wife depending on what the activity is. His favorite activity right now is one that I am very happy with: fishing! The little man and I go fishing quite a bit and it's a lot of fun because it reminds me of the memories that I have with my dad when I was younger going fishing as often as we could. Even just to pop up the street for a quick 1 or 2 hour fishing session to see if we could catch anything was enough to enjoy it.
When he and I were in a store the other day though, he saw a fishing pole he really liked! Granted the pole was on the more expensive side but he was determined to get it. I wasn't going to just buy him things and get him used to that notion of going into a store with dad and see something really cool that you really want and get it. That's not a good way to raise a kid in my opinion and it also doesn't foster some personal and financial responsibility.
We argued in the store of course, because that's what kids do when they are really aiming for something like this that they want but that was okay. I eventually got him out of the store and we made it home. He was asking me what he can do to earn some money. I promptly said he can do chores to help out around the house!
I am a big fan of chores for kids. I did them a little when I was younger but I think it's important that he do a better job than I did. I don't want to be super anal about it and make him do chores before he can go out with his friends or something but he needs to start to carry his weight around the house a bit and save my wife and I some time cleaning! Lol
You better believe that the little man got right to work! With him, I can't say "clean this room" otherwise he seems to get a little overwhelmed at all of the things which I get, he's still a young kid! So I gave him specific tasks to do like clean up his LEGO's, clean up his trucks and even got him to do some vacuuming. I was working at the time while he was doing the cleaning so he was on his own which was good. When he was finished though, he knew where we kept some of the money we set aside for his little allowance and helped himself to what he thought was a fair wage for the 30 minutes of work hahaha. He took 12$!
I brought him down a notch and cut it in half, giving him 6$ for the work he did. I didn't want to shatter his expectations too much but he was ecstatic to earn some money for his fishing pole. He felt that he was in a good position to buy the pole now with his 6$! Sadly it was a 70$ pole so he was still a ways off lol.
We ended up buying him a cheaper pole that only cost us 20$ and he worked some more for it and we pitched in half. It was a good lesson for the little man to learn that's for sure but it was also good for him to understand that in order to get things we want or things we need, we have to work for them! There is a lot of effort to try and make people lazy right now and I think that's going to destroy the world in many different ways. Hopefully we can do what we can to ensure that our son isn't one of the lazy ones and he is going to work as hard as his mom and dad do!
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