Family Work

Since the beginning of humankind, families have worked side by side to nurture and sustain the family and each of its members. Before machines and technology existed to do the simple and mundane tasks humans used to do everyday for sustenance, work was something you did as a family. In the Bible, when Adam and Eve exercised their agency and partook of the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil, they could no longer remain in the Garden of Eden where work was not required. They were cast out of Eden to the Earth where God gave Adam dominion over all the Earth and cursed the ground (Genesis 3:17), requiring Adam to learn to work. But the Bible states that the ground was cursed for Adam’s sake meaning that Adam was going to profit from the labor he performed.

Adam and Eve were also given another commandment: To multiply and replenish the Earth. They were commanded to bear and raise children which is another form of family work. Kathleen Slaugh Bahr and Cheri A. Loveless said this of Adam and Eve: “According to scripture, then, the Lord blessed Adam and Eve (and their descendants) with two kinds of labor that would, by the nature of the work itself, help guarantee their salvation. Both of these labors—tilling the earth for food and laboring to rear children—are family work, work that sustains and nurtures members of a family from one day to the next.” God promised Adam and Even that their posterity would be blessed because of and by the family work they did.

Since Adam and Eve, family work has been the basis of human life, the way by which families were sustained. But at the turn of the eighteenth century, family work changed. The eighteenth century brought the rise of the Industrial Revolution. Work and family became two separate and distinct things. Fathers now had to leave the household to find work to sustain his family. In exchange for their work, they were paid in a different form of currency: money. Money became all the rage during the Industrial Revolution, requiring men to work long hours away from his family to be able to feed them. Men now spent an average of sixty hours a week away from this family to work. This changed the whole dynamic of the family. It wrenched them apart.

Many families also sent their children to work as well for economic reasons. Children had helped with the family work before the Industrial Revolution, so it only made sense that they had to continue to contribute to the household economically. After child labor laws were enforced however no longer allowing children to work, children were sent to school instead with the hopes they could economically contribute more when schooling was done. Now with the father and the children away from the home more many hours a week, this left the majority of the household work to the mothers.

Because the mothers were left to do what was once family work, much of their work was done in isolation. This gave rise to the popular term “housewife” in the twentieth century. “Housewife” or “stay-at-home-mom” now has a negative connotation attached to the word because many wives feel constricted by their role in the family. They feel like they’ve “swapped their brains for a mop”. But women shouldn’t feel this way. Motherhood is a noble and extremely important role in today’s society. Fatherhood too. But with work and family life separated, both roles are not being fully realized or fulfilled.

To counter what family work has been reduced to, I suggest that families find some way to work together when they are home. People view family work as suffering and misery, but family work is one of the best ways for families to bond and for children to develop self-sufficiency. The best things parents can do for their kids is to provide opportunities for them to do hard work – to let them accomplish something they’re proud of. In order lead a healthy and fulfilled life, the struggle of work is necessary.