"work" in the family

People usually work to earn the money they need to sustain their family and to do things with them, they might go on vacations or buy other things.

Why, when we are children, or maybe even now, we associate with a negative thing? Especially when we are not even paid for it.

We first learn about work when we are little. Depending on our family background we might help and work in the house more or less than other people and that shapes our view about work.

As we discussed in our blog about stress (https://tinyurl.com/stress-and-family) we might think that we want a life without work and without worries, but the truth is that we need to work, not because of the money, but because of its effects on us. First, people that work live longer, our body, like our muscles, become stronger and stay stronger as we use them, and the same thing is with the brain. When we work, we learn new things, we meet other people, and we stay socially active. Working is not just being busy doing something, when we work, we have responsibilities, we are accountable for our actions, and we also have a financial reward for our efforts.

When we are young, our parents try to teach us the importance of work by making us work. We might help them, or we might be asked to do something on our own, in either case we start with something small and, as we grow, we usually help, or are asked to help, more. At first the reward we receive is probably not financial. Some things are just our role in the family, there are some things that we are expected to do, others are extras, and our parents might want to reward us financially.

If we think about it, for thousands of years, before people started to go to work in factories and industries, even children were used to work in the family farm or family business. Not only the child learned to work already at a young age but he/she also learned other things while working. These family times (they wife usually worked too) were also teaching opportunities for the parents that most often were also the educational teachers or the children.

When we think about good memories from our infancy, we are often drawn to these working activities that we had with our families. Even though at the time they might have seemed like hard tasks or even punishments we think about we now have a positive tendency towards them.

In my life I always worked in the house and sometimes I even felt it was too much. I remembered a time when I put a paper in the house that said: “child labor”. In my house we always worked in fixing the house, we renovated certain parts, changed the roof, built a road, etc. I remember when I was little the only thing I could do to help my dad and my other brothers was to fill bottles of water at the nearby fountain and add the water to the concrete mixer we had at home.

Regardless how much I thought I disliked the summers spent working under the sun I realized I learned a lot from my father and bonded with my brothers. The good thing of work is that it is cooperative. When we work with someone, we know that person better and, if there is the right environment, we grow closer to each other.

Work is the thing that makes a person successful. Anything worthwhile needs work and effort to be accomplished, an happy marriage and family needs work and effort from each of its member and if we really love someone, we shouldn’t take this opportunity away from them.