(4) Remember that monotony is the curse of labor for both child and adult, but that monotony cannot exist where new intellectual insights are constantly being given.  Therefore, while the daily round of labor, shaped by the daily recurring demands for food, warmth, cleanliness, and sleep, goes on without much change, seize every opportunity to deepen the child’s perception of the relation of this routine to the order of the larger world.  For instance, if a new house is being built near by, visit it with the children, comparing it with your own house, figure out whether it is going to be easier to keep clean and to warm than your house is and why.  If you need to call in the carpenter, the plumber, the paper-hanger, or the stoveman, try to have him come when the children are at home, and let them satisfy their intense curiosity as to his work.  This knowledge will sooner or later be of practical value, and it is immediately of spiritual value.

[Sidenote:  Beautiful Work]

(5) Beautify the work as much as possible by letting the artistic sense have full play.  This rule is so important that the attempt to establish it in the larger world outside of the home has given rise to the movement known as the arts and crafts movement, which has its rise in the perception that no great art can come into existence among us until the common things of daily living—­the furniture, the books, the carpets, the chinaware—­are made to express that creative joy in the maker which distinguishes an artistic product from an inartistic one.  This creative joy, in howsoever small degree, may be present in most of the things that the child does.  If he sets the table, he may set it beautifully, taking real pleasure in the coloring of the china and the shine of the silver and glass.  He ought not to be permitted to set it untidily upon a soiled tablecloth.

[Sidenote:  The Right Spirit]

(6) This is a negative rule, but perhaps the most important of all:  DO NOT NAG.  The child who is driven to his work and kept at it by means of a constant pressure of a stronger will upon his own, is deriving little, if any, benefit from it; and as you are not teaching him to work for the sake of his present usefulness, which is small at the best, but for the sake of his future development, you are more desirous that he should perform a single task in a day in the right spirit, than that he should run a dozen errands in the wrong spirit.

(7) Besides a regular time each day for the performance of his set share in the household work, give him warning before the arrival of that hour.  Children have very incomplete notions of time; they become much absorbed in their own play; and therefore no child under nine or ten years of age should be expected to do a given thing at a given time without warning that the time is at hand.

[Sidenote:  “Busy Work”]