Practical Thoughts on Raising the Next Generation of HearthKeepers
Our homes shift with the seasons and the generations. A chain is forged from mother to daughter, crones to matrons to maids. Again and again, warm hearthlight is passed from cupped hands to cupped hands with whispers of the privilege of being the holder of that merry durability, of being both the carriers of life and the nurturing soil in which that life grows, of being the cheering strength behind and beside strong men.
What are some practical ways we can train up the next generation of homemakers?
In the past, at young ages, the daughters of the family were expected to engage in and were trained from the start in the management of the home. In the early 1900s, our schools offered comprehensive Home Economics courses, and by the mid-1900s so did many colleges. Most of us had chores in the home and participated in the functioning of the home.
What I’d like to purpose is not simply having your daughters do chores, but actively seek to instruct them in home management, and do this as early as possible.
First, delight: We need to fill our teaching (formal and informal) with the delights of homemaking. Make it seem wonderful. Yes, we all have aspects of our work that we don’t enjoy. I’m not suggesting we dishonestly paste a smile on our faces, but our love of our home should be poured into our daughters. Make a point, be purposed, to speak to your daughters about the value and need of homemaking. We should speak to her of the rich depth and open expanses of homemaking. We should let her see the greatness of what she’s been given by God to do. As much as in our power, let’s not allow another generation of girls to abandon the home fires because they think their mom is a slave to the home and the family. Speak! Educate! Show! the next generation the delight of homemaking.
Side note: This will require all of us to work on our attitude. We can’t teach our daughters the delight of homemaking if we are constantly frazzled and complaining. If you regularly complain about something, your kids will go into life with a built-in belief that that thing is the worst. If you complain about your home, your daughters won’t want a home. So many women have turned their back on homemaking because their mothers made every moment of it a drudgery.
Everything I’m going to say hinges on this. If we want another generation of women who raise children and tend homes, we must show them delight. We must show them the joy to be found in creating a home. Daughters should understand not just the work of doing laundry, cooking, and cleaning, but the magic those things bring into lives. If you aren’t happy to be doing this work, if you believe that you could be doing something bigger and better, then our daughters will view it the same way and never even consider being a homemaker. We, ladies, must delight in homemaking.
Second, engage: We need to embrace the hard work of engaging our daughters when they’re young, but also, and especially when they’re not so young. Somewhere in the middle of high school I became, in a totally bratty way, disillusioned with my education. I couldn’t see how any of what I was learning would help me be a wife and mother. It’s not that I didn’t enjoy learning. I can be strongly motivated if the subject is interesting to me, but I couldn’t see how algebra and sentence diagraming were of use in real life. My mom helped as best she could with several stern talks about my attitude and by switching up my studies to more practical applications.
Those helped. The delight of homeschooling is meeting your students where they’re at. The hard part of child-rearing is doing all you can but your child just isn’t getting it or is a stubborn brat and must endure some hard knocks before they return to what you taught them. My point is! As much as we can, we should add homemaker elements, real, tangible elements to our daughters’ educations. Not just the general, everyone should know how to cook, clean, and do laundry, but the deeper aspects of management. Can she cook mac and cheese? Yes! Does she understand and embrace and use the power of warm, gooey mac and cheese? That is something we should be teaching. (And yes, talk to her about the fact that algebra and sentence diagraming can affect her homemaking.)
Side Note: This training up of future homemakers isn’t an excuse for you to take a break from your role as home manager. You’re training, but you’re also training a child. Far too often very young girls, or teens, are given the entire burden of home or siblings because their mother is overwhelmed or burnt out. Keep your eyes on training, not abdicating. Remember your daughters need childhoods full of play, imagination, and exploration too. Find a balance. You don’t make your son get a job providing for the family at a young age, don’t make your daughter in charge of the home. You’re in charge of the home.
My Mom, at one time, had to attend the funeral of my beloved great-grammie. She was gone for a week, reconnecting with family up in Yankeeland. She used this to allow me to manage the home—laundry, cooking, cleaning. I clearly remember the moment she walked out the door and all of what she did for us settled on my shoulders. I was excited and terrified. I had a sudden and profound sense of respect for my Mom.
Side Note: Ladies, teens struggle with respect and self-focus. Help them see what you do, especially your daughters, by putting that burden lightly on them for just a bit while you’re there to help and keep them safe. Don’t make them go out into the cold dark world and then be forced to bear burdens with no safety net.
I was overwhelmed by the work before me and this was with four other siblings doing their chores and helping and Dad overseeing everything. Not to mention Mom had done all the meal planning and shopping.
As we seek to teach our daughters the delight of homemaking, I would recommend placing the burden gently on their shoulders for a time. That’s my wish, that my Mom had repeatedly and in different ways, let me shoulder those burdens. (She may have, I just remember that one week.) We all had chores. We all participated in maintaining the home. We didn’t have men’s work and women’s work. We had work. But there’s a profound difference between your day to clean the bathroom or do the laundry, and managing the home, just as there is between flipping burgers and managing the restaurant.
Giving our daughters some experience in this isn’t an easy task. We have to delegate authority, endure inefficiencies, and allow her to make mistakes to the small detriment of the others in the home. We’ll have to plan and set expectations for ourselves and our daughters and the entire household. And, we must do this at the appropriate time in their lives, not when they’re too young.
When we owned our boutiques and I trained a new manager, we did this super weird thing. We would do a few weeks of intense training, giving the manager more information on the whys and hows of our stores than we gave part-time employees. Once the training was done, we had a week where I would silently and awkwardly watch the new manager. Simply watch. I never engaged her, other employees, or customers. All I did was watch and listen. (You have no idea how hard this is to do.) At the end of each day, we would review the good, bad, and ugly.
As challenging as this system was, it always produced better, strong, and more consistent managers. Plus! It gave me a chance to step back and observe my work. I got a chance to objectively see how our business was doing, how our staff behaved, and was challenged to communicate the inner workings of our boutique.
We should consider doing this for our daughters. Young formative years should be spent having them learn to do chores, function as a person, and speaking to them about homemaking, letting them soak it all in. Then we give them more responsibility and more explanations. When we feel they're ready, let them be in charge of the home for a few weeks with our guidance, direction, and encouragement. Then, we let them do the work while we silently observe and then review at the day's end. We should consider allowing the family to gently give her feedback. She needs to experience criticism of her work, and our other children need to learn how to appropriately critique.
This will help our daughters have a hands-on, practical understanding of the actual work homemaking entails. Remember, this is training, not abdicating your responsibility, and remember to delight.
Third, include: A huge part of reforging the chain from past to present, re-finding cultural memory, and lighting the way back home is simply including our daughters in the work, all the work. Gardening, decorating, building, feeding, research, nutrition, fashion, tending. It’s easy to sideline kids because they’re so inefficient. They’ve never washed dishes, baked a cake, or watered a baby plant. It is so much easier just to do it yourself. It’s also easy to do everything while they’re away at school. Our daughters get a public education but don’t get a home education. They don’t see the home being managed because they’re at school all day. When they get their own homes, they have no muscle memory of how to do basic things. (I know this happens because I’ve hired kids with literally no clue how to vacuum or sweep. I’m supposed to train you how to sell designer fashion but you don’t know how to sweep a floor?)
If we want a next generation of women who have a burning hearthlight, we must let them be part of the homemaking. We must include them in the dance of getting food on the table on time, at the same time, and still relatively warm. We must train them in fabric and textures. We must show them and let them experience the delight of nurturing plants and selecting produce. We must showcase merry durability and cheering strength.
Remember, this is training, not abdicating your responsibility, and remember to delight. Without delight, no amount of training will encourage the next generation of women to tend their hearths.
We must be purposed and intentional! Our cultural memory of homemaking is fading fast in some places, the light so dim. In other places, it has gone out completely. In some places, it’s assumed, yet never actually practically taught. We have women entering their thirties, alone, disillusioned, burnt out, and suffering greatly from the consequences of their choices. We have girls being told they don’t want children. We have girls being taught all men are stupid. We have girls turning to witchcraft because that is the only place they can actively see a return to home and hearth and family and nature. Our daughters need us to suck it up and go at the hard hard hard work of purposefully, intentionally teaching them how to light and tend their hearths and homes.
