Hi-Ho, Hi-Ho: How Can I Teach My Kids to Enjoy Work?

Recently our family moved from the suburbs to 20 wooded acres in the country. This is not because I have a deep love for nature, which is where God keeps the snakes and poison ivy. We moved because of an old-fashioned sense that our four boys will benefit from hard work. Perhaps it was too many passes by videogame display cases crowded by overweight mouth-breathers. Or seeing the glacial pace of slump-shouldered teenagers corralling carts at the grocery store. Whatever the impetus, my wife and I concluded that living where there are fields to mow, trees to cut, predators to kill, equipment to maintain and adventures to pursue would be good for our children. …

…Left-leaning theologians like N.T. Wright and Miroslav Volf, meanwhile, agree that work should be seen not as a pietist's grim duty or as an avenue to wealth but as a way of participating in God's creative order. Liberal Tom Lutz's "Doing Nothing," a book that ostensibly sets out to justify Slackerism, likewise has a beef not with work but with purposeless work.

I'm a small-government guy, but when it comes to a work ethic, I find myself siding with the left. Humans need work, and they need to see that their work has a purpose. Come to think of it, you'll hear that from any of America's countless business gurus. We're all Marxists now.

One summer I installed stairs and flooring in our stifling-hot attic. My oldest son, 4 at the time, insisted on donning his little work belt to help. I situated him in a corner with his tiny hammer and watercolor paint, where he spent hours hammering and painting while I nailed floorboards. Months later, out of the blue, he took my hand and asked when we could do that again. Focused on the heat and the weight of those boards, I'd found the work miserable. But to my son it was blissful. We now had a "secret room." And he had worked with his daddy.

Perhaps too many children fail to value work because their parents fail to shepherd them into a world where work can be meaningful. So maybe I should just shut up and get to working with a smile on my own face. As is so often the case when raising children, the qualities we want them to possess must first be cultivated in ourselves.