Building Character

This past month high school football coach, Matt Labrum, suspended his entire team because of widespread character failures. The players had been skipping class, making poor grades, disrespecting teachers, bullying other students. Labrum said, “Enough!” He demanded the uniforms of all 50 varsity players.

But Labrum gave them a path to reinstatement, which included serving the people and institutions in their lives. Labrum first asked them to spend their Saturday serving their families and be able to show pictorial proof of that service. One boy cleaned out a pigpen. Another repaired a deck. The coach’s next requirement was to visit a nursing home. One boy marveled at how happy one of the patients was to host a visitor. Then a few days later Labrum sent them to a nearby Junior High to wash windows and pull weeds.

The whole experience was transformative for some. One father said that he and his son stayed up very late talking one night about the issues surrounding this event, and the boy concluded: “You know what? We can be better. And I can be a better leader.”

Psychologist John Rosemond believes that children need self-respect more than self-esteem. Self-respect is based on the “knowledge that you are making a positive contribution.... A person with self-respect focuses primarily on his or her obligations to others.” But in many homes today kids are allowed to focus on themselves—their school work, their sports, their other extracurricular activities. They are treated like privileged house guests rather than contributing members of a household. When our boys complained about household chores—“Why do we have to weed the garden? Our friends aren’t their parents’ slaves!”—we would try to calmly explain: “Family life is a joint effort. If you don’t help out then some other member of this family will be unfairly burdened.”

When Rosemond speaks to parent groups, he asks them to raise a hand if they did chores as a child. Almost all of them raise a hand. But when he asks them to raise a hand if they require their kids to do regular chores, only a few raise a hand. Doing chores is an important character-builder for kids, helping them learn the joy of serving others.