The following post is written by Steady Mom's monthly contributor, Hillary.
One of our family's priorities is to model healthy and happy relationships with the work we do to sustain our family and our lifestyle.
We want our children to know and believe that:
* Work is a valuable way to contribute and participate in your local and global community. What you spend your time doing makes a difference in a big way!
* You can support yourself following your passions. It might take some creativity, flexibility and time, but it is possible to fulfill creative possibility and provide for your family.
* Everyone is good at something. Spend time honing your natural talents and find ways to integrate those skills into your life and work.
* Life, work and learning is not separate, but rather an interwoven aspect of being alive. It's important to like (and even love) what you do.
* A sense of fulfillment is just as important as getting paid. You can have both.
Right now we sustain ourselves with a small, family business.
My husband is a stone craftsman and works with homeowners to design and install functional and beautiful stonescapes in their personal outdoor living spaces. He loves working outdoors, meeting new people and working with his hands.
I run the office and manage the marketing and our website and social media venues. I like crunching numbers, thinking up creative ways to sustain a successful small business and I love managing websites and using social media to make connections.
We involve the kids whenever possible and use work as an opportunity to discuss our society's system of exchanging time and skill for money. We explain how we choose to pass that money along for food, shelter, other necessities and the ever important treats we all enjoy.
The real life learning experiences are limitless as the conversations turn from money to ethics to the importance of saving and investing our money back into our local community. We scale these conversations appropriately to our young children's ages, but I see vast opportunity for deep and meaningful discussions as we grow together in the future.
We do our best to model the realistic necessity of working while integrating our own ideals.
For example, when Joel began to get burnt out doing the same type of job over and over we started brainstorming on what would be more exciting for him. He talked about wanting to empower homeowners to be able to do their own work and a desire to do less heavy lifting.
We developed a DIY option that not only gets the homeowner involved in the process and saves them some money, but it also spares Joel some of the heavy labor he was starting to resent.
Our community has responded wildly to our offering and for right now we've found a solution that works for everyone.
**How do you integrate work into your family life and learning experience? What are your family's ideals when it comes to the necessity of work and jobs? What are your hopes for your children's work ethics and attitudes?**
If you enjoyed
this post, I hope you'll subscribe
to Steady Mom--it's free!
Hillary
is a thoughtful mother, loving wife, and a conscientious cook and
consumer. She
credits her two boys (& a baby on the way!) to her ever expansive
knowledge base and blogs about mindful family living at infinitelearners.com.
