Leaning on the Lord: When a Child Does Not Wish to Work

I have never known an adult or a child who has always wanted to work. Have you? There is something in us that initially rebels against labour. This must go back to Eden. Whereas pre-fall Adam undoubtedly found his task of naming the animals delightful, post-fall Adam wrestled with thorns and thistles and ate bread only by the sweat of his brow.

 

Fast forward to 2024 and idleness still comes more naturally to me than diligence. In the short-term it is easier to turn a blind eye to dirty dishes, and overflowing laundry baskets than to bring order to chaos. I don’t think we should be surprised when our children push back against work, especially when we are starting our home-educating journeys. Often, we are feeling a little bit insecure about our decision to teach at home and our children sense this and push boundaries safe in the knowledge that we really do not know what to enforce and what to ignore. Prevalent thought amongst home educators that education should be “child-led” often plays into our uncertainty.

 

We are on safe ground biblically, however, to think that our children should be working for some of the time, even if it is just a few minutes of the day. Proverbs consistently warns us against the sluggard and praises the diligent. Nevertheless, it sometimes pays to first consider whether we are unwittingly frustrating our children rather than setting them up to win.

 

If somebody woke me up in the middle of the night and told me to hoover the house, I would feel a bit irritated. Would you? If I had just sat down at the end of a long day with a good book and my husband announced that I needed to clean the bathrooms, I don’t think I would respond very graciously. Yet, I think we easily fail to recognise that our children have very often made plans for the day and they feel frustrated when we scupper them unannounced.

 

When we do not instil routine into our home-educating lives the net result is frustration everywhere. If my children are halfway through building a high-tech den in the sitting room when I announce a surprise lesson, it will not go down very well. If they are putting on trainers to go outside and make mud-pies and I decide they need to come to the table for a sudden spelling lesson, then I can expect some push-back. My children become frustrated, I become frustrated and the net result is disaster!

 

Routines are built up slowly over time. Rather than dump six hours of lessons, taught at random throughout the day on an unsuspecting four-year-old, it makes much more sense to fix a short ten-minute lesson to a certain time of the day (after breakfast, lunch or during the baby’s naptime). Once this short lesson has become a habit, we can then add something else into the mix. Our children quickly learn that certain parts of the day are for work and certain parts of the day are for play. If they respect the work time, I respect their play time. If they refuse to work for those few minutes I require of them, then they forfeit their right to play.

 

If we take part in a quiz and realize that the questions are pretty much impossible to answer, we switch off pretty quickly don’t we? Likewise, if the questions are unbelievably easy, we rapidly become bored.

 

Very often, the reason that children push back against work is because we are asking them to do work that they cannot possibly attempt. It takes a little while for mothers to learn just how much we need to break down the concepts. For example, it seems alien to me that there was a time when my little ones could not simply add one to a number and arrive at the correct answer. Before being able to master this little skill, they needed to be able to count to at least ten, recognise what these numbers look like on paper, understand what a “plus” sign looks like and does and learn the concept that “adding one means that we go to the next number”. A whole lot of learning had to be achieved before the simple skill of adding one could be mastered.

 

I very often repeat material if I do not think that my child is grasping it. Learning is only fun if we feel confident about what we are doing. A little bit of extra information is tantalizing when a good foundation is already in place. This especially goes for mastery subjects such as Reading, Spelling and Maths.

 

There may be a time when we think we have tried to make any necessary adjustments and we have to ask ourselves whether our child is rebellious in every area of their life or whether it is only when we do “schoolwork”. If I ask my child to pick up a toy, does he pick up the toy or does he refuse to do what he has been told? Has our child decided that the automatic response to anything that mum or dad says is immediate push-back? Again, I am talking about reasonable commands and requests. It is reasonable to expect a child to pick up a coat and put it away. It is obviously not reasonable to expect them to paint the house!

 

We do not need to panic if we have a child who is pushing back against work. God has placed children in our homes sovereignly and part of home education is considering the whole child. If a child is tending towards laziness or disobedience (which we all do anyway) then part of our loving duty towards that child is to help them. Teaching Maths is only part of the picture. Very often, a child who does not wish to work throws mum into panic mode whereas really God is just showing us an area of that child’s life that desperately needs the Word of God. How much better to be aware of our child’s failings and to consider what we can do to help them than to be oblivious until going to a parent’s evening at the end of the year.

 

I believe that every situation we encounter when we teach our children at home is an opportunity to learn something. A child pushing back against work presses us to reflect on our teaching skills and the way we manage the day. Above all, this child causes us to lean more heavily on the Lord and any situation that causes us to fall more deeply on his grace is a reason to be thankful. Otherwise, we might actually begin to believe that our work could be accomplished in our own strength.