As we focus on motherhood this month, here is very practical encouragement from Elisabeth on training your young children. May they experience the joy of the Lord in good and godly work.
If you have small children, you have the toughest, most demanding, exhausting, consuming job in the world. You need help! Watching my daughter Valerie with her three children shows me that keeping them happily occupied while she does her necessary housework is no small matter. Have you thought of giving even tiny children work to do? It doesn’t have to be all play. They can learn very early to do small tasks: put away the silverware, store paper bags when you come home from grocery shopping, empty waste paper baskets, pick up toys and clothes and put them where they belong, straighten shoes on the closet floors, wipe baseboards with a damp rag, sweep under the radiators with a small dust brush , pick up sticks from the lawn, take everything out of a drawer or shelf so that you can clean it, then put it back. Of course you can do it better and faster. But if you patiently show a child how to do these things and then patiently (!) let him do them, he will: I) learn to work, 2) be taught responsibility, 3) have the pleasure of being useful, 4) learn that actions have consequences, 5) feel himself an important member of the household, 6) know he is needed, 7) enjoy cooperating with mother, and 8) be busy. A few weeks or months of patience on your part, provided you start early enough, will result in an ordered home, where each person contributes to the others’ happiness as a matter of course. I think most parents are way behind their children’s development-in other words, they are saying, “Oh, he’s not old enough for that. He can’t understand that yet,” when the truth is the child is well able to understand and perform much better than his parents give him credit for. I’ve seen evidence of this on occasions when I have taken care of other people’s children. They’ve done for me (simply because they saw that I expected it) what they “could not” do for their parents (because they knew that the parents did not expect it). This lesson is one the Indian mothers taught me years ago in the jungle. Survival demanded that children take far more responsibility than is ever required of them in our country. They did it. They did it without complaint or protest of any kind. They took care of baby brothers and sisters, went hunting or fishing or gathering food when food was needed, crossed rivers, climbed steep hills, made their way on rugged and muddy trails, built fires, carried water. It was expected. Children generally live up to expectations. Expect them to be helpless-they will be.
**Excerpt originally from The Elisabeth Elliot Newsletter May/June 1983