I have to admit, I’m challenged when the issue of hard work in school comes up. In our society today, we hear reports about the crushing homework load that students face. As parents, we struggle with the flow of ensuring our children have a “normal” adolescence, assuming there even is such a thing. As I’ve been thinking and reading about it, however, I’m becoming increasingly convinced that what our kids really need is to work hard in good, meaningful, purposeful activity, and that most of the issues our kids struggle with today isn’t due to not enough unstructured leisure time, but too much.
Malcolm Gladwell, one of those authors who everyone talks about, has written a book that everyone is talking about called David and Goliath. If you haven’t read it, you don’t have time not to do so. In it, he talks about the paradoxical manner in which the struggles and challenges we face in life, those that in some cases should be crushing to people, actually serve as advantages and the keys to their success. He addresses the idea of raising kids in a relatively-wealthy environment. He quotes a Hollywood executive who says, “My own instinct is that it’s much harder than anybody believes to bring up kids in a wealthy environment. People are ruined by challenged economic lives. But they’re ruined by wealth as well because they lose their ambition and they lose their pride and they lose their sense of self-worth… there’s probably some place in the middle which works best of all.”
Gladwell introduces research that emphasizes that the executive’s instinct is accurate—that more is not always better. He notes that money tends to make parenting easier until families reach an income of around $75,000 a year. At that point, parenting becomes harder again, because “how do you teach ‘work hard, be independent, learn the meaning of money’ to children who look around themselves and realize that they never have to work hard, be independent, or learn the meaning of money…Wealth contains the seeds of its own destruction.”
I know I’ve bitten off a big topic here. In fact, I’m probably not going to be able to finish this today and will have to revisit it at another time. That being said, in light of Gladwell’s conclusions (which seem to me to be common grace insight, consistent with what Scripture says about money), it seems that the more opportunities we can give our children to learn hard work and to be self-sufficient, the better off they will be.
I’m not arguing that we should have them pushing a millstone when they’re five; there’s an age-appropriateness issue here. I also realize that not everyone who may read this is on the apex of that income U-curve. More money may be helpful to you, and I understand that. I’m also not condoning overscheduling non-purposeful activity for our kids. But, for the adolescents of middle to upper-middle class to upper class families, I think the default for kids is either enough, or way too much, leisure time.
Kids need hard work; they need a school that’s going to challenge them and give them plenty to do. They need purposeful activity, opportunities to labor alongside their peers to accomplish worthy goals, overseen, guided and directed by adults who love them but who aren’t invested in them to the point that their identity is wrapped up in them, as, unfortunately, ours as parents sometimes are.
I have friends who are 16 years old, and I have friends who are 50. In my life, I have seen that with precious few exceptions, people of any age who have too much money AND too much free time at the same time get themselves in trouble, like David who stayed home hanging out on his rooftop looking out over Jerusalem, instead of going to battle with his troops. That was the beginning of a whole lot of trouble for him, and for us. God created us to work, and good, God-glorifying work is our default mode, no matter how young or old we are. Rest is important, but rest is only rest and satisfying when it’s a respite from work; otherwise, it’s sloth (sorry—just went King James on you, there). This is what Solomon was saying in Proverbs 6, when he writes, “How long will you lie there, O sluggard? When will you arise from your sleep? A little sleep, a little slumber, a little folding of the hands to rest, and poverty will come upon you like a robber, and want like an armed man.” Not just material poverty, but a poverty of the soul, a robbing of desire to serve, to achieve, to glorify one’s Lord through good, noble, hard work.
We’ve worked so hard to give our kids everything, but wouldn’t we all grieve if, in showering them with time and money now, we bankrupt their future? I think God calls us to work the little suckers hard; sure, they’ll moan and complain now, but we’ll rest assured that they’ll be later be very grateful and do the same thing to our grandkids. And, then they’ll moan and complain. And, then we’ll have our revenge.
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