Children as Apprentices

The first conclusion many make connecting  children to apprentice is slave labor and child labor laws. A far cry from reality, I assure you. Children are not in the home for the benefit of the bigger people who want someone else to do all the dirty work.

In fact, one day I made a promise to whatever children I might have while standing at the kitchen sink. You see, I really did not like doing dishes. My sister who was my dish partner and I did a lot of dishes growing up. I don’t have any horrific stories about dish washing. She might. I just remember it being a regular thing. Day in. Day out. Day in. Day out. Endlessly.

So standing at my own sink at some young adult age, it dawned on me that I would probably be doing dishes until shortly before I died–and making beds, cleaning toilets, fixing food and putting gas in a car.

At that insightful moment, I realized “chores” (dull, routine housekeeping tasks) are not really chores. They are ongoing requirements of civilized living. They do not exist to thwart a good life; they are elements of a good life.

Then and there, I promised those unknown future children, I would not assign them the dish washing job until a couple of things happened: first, I learned for myself how to be pleasantly willing–as a perpetual state of my character–to do dishes three or four times a day, by myself, until the day I died, if necessary, and, second, I would give them the job as part of an ongoing life learning experience, not a mindless pawn-off to benefit myself.

So in my mind, apprentices are not learning how to do little chores here and there, just to give them something “useful” to do in the midst of all their free time. No apprentices, from the moment of conception, were responsible-to-God-for-themselves-adults-in-training, just like me, only not as old. Together we were going to work for a pleasant, God-honoring, well-maintained, and engaging home life for two homes: the one they would grow in and the one they would live in as adults.