My five-year-old is a hard worker. When the other children lose steam and grow tired, hot, and bored, she is the one who will be there many hours after the job has grown tedious. After the three hurricanes last year, she was the one who raked the twenty bags of debris with my husband and stayed until the job was over. And she was only four then.

Now, my other children are not lazy, but they do not have the drive to stick with a task and push beyond their weariness when there is no reward in sight. After an hour of raking and leaf mashing, you will usually see them playing sword fight or jumping in the pile of just-raked leaves. Which is fine. My husband likes to keep their interest by letting them each have a turn being…The Leaf Masher. This is where Dad uses the kid– a.k.a. The Leaf Masher–as a human stick to mush down the leaves in the giant garbage can.

The time will come that they will have to develop the ability to push beyond their distaste, and I don’t want it to be a shock for my teenagers. Not all children are good workers naturally. In fact, sin causes us to love laziness and incline ourselves toward that which gratifies ourselves. This is not a sin just for children but for all of us. As a mother, this means that I must teach my children to work and not make excuses for their laziness. Or my own.

It is easier in the short-run to ignore their laziness; more effort is required to teach a good work ethic. However, if you take the time needed to combat laziness, you will reap fruit in the short-term as well as the long-term.

I recently spent several hours cleaning the upstairs bedrooms. The start of the school year, my recent agreement to be the church pianist again, and getting the flu all attributed to neglecting a deep cleaning of the upstairs rooms. My daughter worked alongside me the entire morning and did not grumble when I gave her some of the more distasteful jobs: scrubbing the toilet, washing the floors, and cleaning out the trashcans. I worked alongside of her every step of the way. Of course, I let her squirt all the spray bottles when we got to that part, even though it took double the time for her to do the task. It’s important that they enjoy the “fun” parts of a job too, even though I could fly through them much faster.

I washed all the sheets, blankets, and pillows in the guest room, and I decided that I should teach her how to make a bed properly. I showed her how to get all the wrinkles out of the sheets, how to pull everything tight, and how to stuff a pillow into a case. She was overwhelmed at the beginning because there are tons of pillows and blankets on the guest bed. But we worked through the task, talking the whole way through. When we were done, we threw ourselves across the bed, looked at the ceiling, and chatted. Then I took her to the store to pick out material for a few new skirts, but she did not know that a reward was waiting for her at the end of the task. That made giving it even more pleasurable.

Every child-development psychologist in the country would tell you that it is important to give children age-appropriate tasks. The truth is that children can do a lot more than dust the TV and feed the goldfish when you work alongside of them. The problem is not that we expect too much, but that we expect too little—of our children and ourselves.