Blessings Come to Families who Work Together

Some of the most successful marriages and families are established and maintained on principles of work. Many families work together to keep things together, they work together to get things done. In Chapter 21, we learn "The reason family-centered work brings blessings and salvation is so obvious in common experience that it has become obscure: Family work provides endless opportunities to recognize and fill others' needs. It thus teaches us to love and serve one another, inviting us to be like Jesus Christ." When we are serving each other, we learn things about other people that we probably wouldn't have known. We can learn about what they have been up to, what their likes and dislikes are, and how we can provide more service to them.

Elder Neal A. Maxwell observed, "The divine attributes of love, mercy, patience submissiveness, meekness, purity... cannot be developed inn the abstract. These require the clinical experiences... Nor can these attributes be developed in a hurry." Through work, and serving our family members, we can become more like our Savior, Jesus Christ.
Parents do not need to worry about having a perfect system for doing chores. Work that unifies hearts is "not after the manner of men." Individuals and families, with diligence and through inspiration, can discover better ways to solve their earthly challenges than anything a leader or so-called expert could impose. We can take ideas from other people, but we don't have to use their system, we need to find what is going to work for us as parents and what will work for our children.
Parents who are wanting their children to work, should seek an approach based on "attentive love". Parents may often find themselves easily convinced to fall back on child-rearing. Attentive love asks "What is the child telling me through this behavior?" and "How can I help my child so that he/she is pulled closer to the family, so that he/she is not pushed away?" Of course, in any household, loving feelings run up and down, but caring parents can strive to manifest love as the expected norm. Essayist Wendell Berry tells how daily habits of caring and serving eventually carry us beyond the difficulties of life into a manifestation of love. "Our marriages, kinships, friendships, neighborhoods, and all our forms and acts of homemaking are the rites by which we solemnize and enact our union with the universe... They give the word "love" its only chance to mean, for only they can give it a history, a community, and a place. Only in such ways can love becomes flesh and do its worldly work."

We sell Christmas trees every year from Black Friday to the 15th of December

All family members are able to assist in family work. Children can learn to take responsibility for their part in family work. The Lord teaches us that we have an obligation to see the needs of others and respond to them in loving ways. The Lord has high expectations, for He knows our capabilities. Likewise, parents should have high expectations for their children. We establish these expectaitons in caring ways, but children need to know their particiation in family work is not optional.

Mothers set the household tone for family work. "The problem is not so much the presence or absence of a 'work ethic' as [it is] the meaning of work and the ways it links, or fails to link, individuals to one another." Mothers do so much to get everything done that might need to be done plus so much more. I have seen my mom get so many things done in one day. She gets dishes done everyday, makes a meal for us most nights of the week, does laundry, watches my niece and nephews, gets bills paid, does all sorts of cleaning, but she also drives everyone around, picks me up from work, makes sure that we are still getting to all of our activities that have been scheduled and so much more.

Fathers set the example for any and all participation in household chores. When the father complains about having to help with things around the house, the children will also. But when he does it with a willing heart, the children will be more willing to help out with the chores. My dad is a really good example of this. He hasn't ever complained about helping my mom around the house, but he does say something when my brothers complain about having to help with a small chore. I love my dad and for the love that he has for helping my mom.
Being a part of a family, means that I still need to do my part-in and out of the house. I do a lot to help my parents out because they have already worked so hard to make me the person who I am today. I like to try to relieve some of their duties, so that they can find sometime for themselves.