Growing Children With Pluck: On Making Excuses Not Like Benjamin Franklin:
As a mother, as I’m sure you do, I deal often with helping my children take responsibility, be determined and diligent, and for Pete’s sake, not make excuses for everything.
I had a child tell me the other day that he “can’t do his schoolwork.”
“Oh, why?” I asked.
“Well, we helped Mrs. _______ this morning, and didn’t get to do our school, and I don’t like doing school after lunch.”
This came out of his mouth.
“Can’t” is not the same as “don’t want to.”
Being a mom informs me that making excuses is natural to humans and needs to be conquered.
Which got me thinking that really this excuse-making pervades our society. It hasn’t been conquered. Our excuses are just cloaked in mature-sounding rhetoric.
“I can’t stay home with my newborn because we can’t afford it.” (i.e. I don’t like driving an old car, or living in a more humble house, or skipping vacations, or…)
I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard how “irresponsible” it is to have children if you “can’t give them what they need.” (Even as in, two children might deprive one.) Which might be the most disparate opinion ever there was. So excuse-making for ourselves reaches over into guilting other people so I don’t feel as badly about my excuses. Maybe.
We make excuses to avoid hardship. We cannot abide hardship and most certainly never see its benefit.
But history shows it:
Consider one of the greatest men that ever lived, especially in terms of his contribution to the world. Benjamin Franklin was the 15th child of 17 (his father had 7 before he married Ben’s mother), born to a poor family.
“Benjamin only had two years of formal education, which finished when he was ten years old, because his family could not afford the fees….He had to work in his father’s business.”
Let me flesh this out for you: he was forced to quit school to go to work at ten years old. Most people consider that child abuse. Most people would rebuke his parents harshly for having (far) more children than they could “provide for.”
But you see, things aren’t always what they seem. We’ve built this cushy idea of life in a tiny box, and we can’t see outside of it. I submit to you that Benjamin Franklin may have been so successful precisely because life was so hard.
We insist that the rat race of sports is what will make our children great, or enough extracurricular, or entertainment, or better clothes, more vacations, a new car, paid college tuition–we spend our lives for these, often sacrificing what is better.
Here’s what Franklin said of his father:
“At his table he liked to have, as often as he could, some sensible friend or neighbor to converse with, and always took care to start some ingenious or useful topic for discourse, which might tend to improve the minds of his children. By this means he turned our attention to what was good, just, and prudent in the conduct of life.” Franklin’s Autobiography
Conversation around the table. Being together. A father imparting the wisdom of life. Working side by side, living honestly. Seems too simple. Franklin didn’t lament tattered clothing. Or even his having to quit school. He didn’t whine about the “cruelty” or “abuse” of growing up hard. And he didn’t blame. He did remember, with affection, the important things his parents did. He didn’t make excuses and he charged ahead with what he had.
There are many more stories in history like this one.
I know I don’t have the pluck of Benjamin Franklin. I sure wish I had even a fraction of it. But studying men like that reminds me to be a different parent. To help my children learn to pull themselves up by the bootstraps and not be tempted to coddle them so much.
I want them to do hard things and not make excuses. Because I love them.
9 comments
I’ll take some more pluck too. Amen! Says the mummy to 9 children, with one income, and homeschooling. :o)
Very easy for all of us to make excuses, I agree.
I got a note one time from a former teaching colleague of mine who was sending me some material I’d requested quite a long time before. Her note was simple, and read something like, “Here are the materials you requested, with my apologies for the delay. I have no reasons for my tardiness, only excuses. I am sorry.”
I appreciated her humility. And it certainly was instrumental in teaching me to think in terms of whether my not doing something is based on (legitimate) reasons, or on excuses. Sometimes there are good reasons to decline to do something — we can’t do everything, after all — but making excuses for things we really don’t want to do, but ought, well, that’s an entirely different matter.
A good thing to teach our kids, and an important thing for us adults to learn and practice as well!
C,
That’s good. I’ve come to learn about myself that I loathe excuses (at least from other people-ha ha). I’d rather someone tell the brutal honesty about something than make excuses. I tell my children often, “I’d be happier if you said, ‘I was being lazy and didn’t organize my time well and that’s why I didn’t clean my room today.’ instead of an excuse.” I can work with honesty.
The words of a grade school teacher come to mind – “‘I can’t’ is a sluggard too lazy to try.” That might just qualify as brutal honesty! 😉
*like*
Amen. Thank you for this encouragement. We have been dealing with excuses a lot lately.
My grandmother was the youngest of seven. Her parents were share choppers in Oklahoma. Her father died when she was very young. They had dirt floors, no electricity, and no indoor plumbing. She had one pair of shoes per year, bought in the fall. She considered herself fortunate to have completed elementary school before her family needed her home, but she worked in the cotton fields as a much younger child too.
Whenever one of my children cops an attitude or makes an excuse or starts acting spoiled, I am reminded of how she grew up, and it spurs me to improve my efforts in raising my children.
*croppers
We really don’t know if Abe made excuses and/ or complained about life’s hardships. What we do know is that if he did, he didn’t stay there. He moved beyond his excuses and complains. Sometimes, we dwell on our excuses and don’t move forward. We use them to enable our laziness and lack of progression in life in general.
On another note, today I was watching home videos of when my kids were little. I had 3 under 6 years of age. Life was a hoot!! We played a lot and created many fun memories. I told my husband that I used to think that that was hard. Now I think that was easy!
I think my life is harder now (4 kids between 12 and 5 y.o. and a bigger house). I wonder if when I am an empty nester I will think my life will be even harder then – without my children. All to say, (that I can always find something to complain about :/) OR that when we go through things it’s always hard, and we overcome those by God’s grace. Afterwards looking back we can see how strong and wise we became because of those hardships.