Want Your Child to be Joyful When Helping? Here’s How

How often do you ask your children to help you with something and you have to repeat yourself and possibly even bribe them into it. Your hands are occupied and you need help, but your child always seems reluctant to help.

Sometimes very young children are very quick and eager to help. They want to copy what you do and they seek your approval so much. As they get older they start to hesitate a little more. It might interfere with what they are wanting to do.

I truly believe in having a standard and holding your kids to that standard. Teaching them to help joyfully, without complaining and to do it right away when you ask. I want my children to joyfully serve other people now, but also when they are adults out in the world. this doesn’t come naturally for people. Children have to be trained in this area.

Here are some practical ways we can encourage them to do that:

One of the best ways to do this is to model it. Especially in your home. Serve them joyfully, serve your husband joyfully and serve other people joyfully, even when doing things you don’t particularly like doing. Don’t do it begrudgingly or in order to hold something over someone’s head. Let them see YOU serving joyfully and selflessly.

Another way, is by cultivating a safe and nourishing environment and relationships with each of your children. I notice that when my children are feeling loved, they are more quick to respond to my requests as well as carrying out the task happily.

Have conversations about joyfully doing daily tasks with scriptures. Scriptures on gratitude, doing things without complaining, being selfless and selfishness. Biblegateway.com is a great tool for this, just type in the word of the subject you are looking for and it will pull up scriptures on that subject. (Or you could do it the old fashioned way and pull out a concordance. It could be fun looking through the list of scriptures and looking them up in the bible together with your child.)

Also, don’t request that they do tasks that are above their maturity level or too burdensome for them. For example, my daughter was consistently having a very hard time picking up toys. I have a rule that my children have to clean their room after quiet resting time before they can come down for a snack. It got to the point where my daughter would always have a melt down and not clean her toys up and just stay in her room. I realized that this was beyond her maturity level because she was too overwhelmed with the size of the task. I had been giving her way too many toys to play with. When she would play, she would have a ton of toys covering her bedroom floor. This was too daunting of a task for her, so she just wouldn’t clean any of it up. It started to become a battle. So I simplified what toys she was able to play with in her room and it eliminated this problem completely.

I figured it out when we were having this problem with the downstairs toys as well. So now I try to stick with just a few quality toys that she enjoys.

An important concept to make a habit of in all of this that benefits us and our children is to find joy in all things. How can I find something to be grateful in this situation? You will be surprised at what you can find to be thankful for, even in dismal situations. So when chatting with your kids about what they need to do, mention the blessings in the task. Like having toys to clean up or having a comfy bed to make. This is something we can all focus on a little more. Making this a habit will teach us to autopilot to gratitude and this can be life transforming.