In the comments on the post below, I was asked to clarify what I meant by matching children with their gifts. I said,

If you give children responsibility for their own little enterprise (as opposed to just using them as free labor and expecting them to be jolly about it), they will develop an appetite for worthwhile projects. We look for ways to match each child’s giftedness with their own domain. As the children get older, I look forward to turning over things to their supervision and expertise.

I didn’t mean to imply that when dinner is over, everyone thanks me for the privilege in allowing him or her to sweep, wipe the table, and load the dishwasher. There are regular chores that need to be done daily, and the responsibilities for those are divided up according to ability. If we waited until everyone liked what they were doing, nothing would get done. The seven-year-old fills the dishwasher; the six-year-old clears the table; the four-year-old sweeps. I usually put away leftovers and hose off the toddler. My husband bounces the newborn.

As far as allowances go, I haven’t thought that one through entirely, but my initial reaction is against it. The kids don’t know what allowances are yet (Homeschooling Advantage #435), and so we haven’t had to address it. They earn money other ways, and I’m not initially inclined to pay them just for clearing the table or keeping their room clean.

But getting to the example you asked for, my son has shown an interest in carpentry (much to my woodworking husband’s delight). We bought our seven-year-old his own set of tools, not fake plastic ones. He wears a tool belt, just like his Dad. We don’t give our kids “busy work”; they can smell it a mile away. So, this weekend my son built a trellis for our grapes. It looks just like the one my husband built for my climbing rose bush, but maybe a little more crooked.

Sawing
trellis

It requires time and energy to allow young children some oversight in these things. In the time my husband spent overseeing it, Greg could’ve built three trellises, but the end goal is not efficiency. In a few years, I’d like to see my son building things for a profit, enjoying the fruit of his labor. For now, hopefully the fruit he’ll eat will be of the real kind. (That would be the grapes. Ba-da-bing.)

This is what I meant when I said that we try to match the kids’ interests with worthwhile projects. There are better examples I can think of, but I wanted to give a concrete and recent example from our own home. To flesh out the entire concept, I highly recommend Joel Salatin’s Family Friendly Farming. Don’t let the title fool you, however. Salatin explains the wisdom in giving children control of an enterprise (in his case—agrarian ones, but it is easy to see how this applies to non-farming households). In turning over projects, children develop an enthusiasm, ownership and care that they otherwise wouldn’t. Since my children are still very young, they still need a great deal of oversight, but we try to let them some degree of autonomy, as much as is reasonable.

My future carpenter is reading over my shoulder as I type. I asked him (just to make sure that I wasn’t being a fraud here) if he enjoyed building the trellis this weekend. He replied, “Yes. Why wouldn’t I have?”

Some jobs need to be done. I suspect nobody will develop an affinity for taking out the trash, but when it comes to projects and their future enterprises, we do our best to match them with their interests and then turn over to them some measure of executive oversight.