I spent the better part of the day splitting firewood. With my elbow surgery, that was a significant project which languished through the Winter months. I tried to work on it at one point, but my arm started getting sore. Thus, I figured best to lay off. With the Winter being so lame, it worked out fine since I didn’t need to worry about dipping into the newly chopped firewood.
Before I went out, I made sure to inform the kids they would be assisting me. I wasn’t looking for much- mainly, help with loading the chopped wood into the wheelbarrow so it could be taken over to the pile for stacking.
All told, the kids stuck it out for almost 4 hours worth of work. And not the most fun kind of work either. Lugging firewood from one pile to another pretty much exemplifies tedium. At one point, they were making a game of it, trying to move the chopped wood faster than I could create more. They lost steam for the last hour or so, with the lass basically checking out about an hour before I finally stopped.
She was rolling around on the ground, pretending to sneak up on the pile, or something like that. That was a pretty good sign that she’d had it.
The boy stuck it out until the end. I did have to help him with getting the last of the chopped wood stacked, but he didn’t complain or whine the entire time.
Despite the success with getting them to pitch in, the thing that really struck me was how quickly they decided that their work wasn’t for free. Throughout much of the day, they wanted to know how much it was worth. Would they get money for their school’s mini-mall next week? Was it worth extra DS time? Could they play the Wii?
And here it comes… When I was a kid helping out with some type of chore at home, I never expected my parents to reward me for the work. I did it because it was expected of me. The difference between myself and my kids struck me.
I suspect their mild form of extortion is a result of the current trends where kids are rewarded with something when they do something right. Or, at least, not wrong or destructive. Kids are smart enough to extrapolate that meager reward early on to more self serving rewards later.
They’ll have to relearn those habits though, or they’ll end up being disappointed more often than not.