Taking On Homesteading as a Family

In a homesteading family, everyone has a role and plays a critical part of the overall success of the entire homestead.

If you’ve decided to take on the role of a homesteading family, then you’ve probably come to realize that homesteading with children might mean your homestead life may not be picture perfect. You probably won’t be able to complete chores as easily with toddlers in tow, and though they mean well, sometimes children “helping” causes more work than help.

This article will share ideas on ways to help you navigate life as a homesteading family, while encouraging your children to fall in love and embrace the lifestyle along the way.

Tips for Combining Homesteading with Raising Children

Homesteading as a family can be challenging.  Choosing to involve the entire family can make projects take longer, can prevent some projects from even happening, and can be frustrating and challenging.  Recognizing that homesteading with children is an opportunity to sow seeds of excitement into our future generations can be the key to understanding it’s ok to be behind on the homestead.  It’s ok to push off projects so that you can take some extra time to help your children fall in love with the homesteading lifestyle. 

Involve the Children in Your Daily Chores

From an early age, the best way to encourage children to want to be involved with the homestead is to include them. When you go out to do chores at night, bring them with you. Often, as they watch you night after night, they’ll start to want to help as well. This is a good thing!

Safety Comes First

Bringing little children along for the chores sometimes isn’t always a good idea safety-wise. Moving cattle or operating large machinery, for example, are examples of times when you might decide that little children may do better as spectators from the safety of the car window or the front porch.

Not Time Friendly, But So Worthwhile

Involving the children with the chores of the day is not a time-friendly option. Even so, it is still incredibly important to involve the children in the chores. Even though it does take time and make things more difficult, allowing children to help teaches them to recognize their value. Additionally, it encourages them to be contributing members of the homesteading family. If a child wants to help, and is turned away or told it will take too long if they do, they’re not going to feel like they’re very capable. When you ask them later as an older child to help, you’ll most likely be met with resistance. Teaching children from a very early age through praise and encouragement that they can, and do, play an important role in the homesteading family’s success is critically important to helping children form a desire to help on the homestead.

My almost two-year-old daughter has been toddling along with us outside during chore time as long as she could walk. More recently, she’s been really eager to help. She wants to carry hay to the cows and haul buckets of water down to the barn. And so, we hold her hand and let her toddle over to the fence to throw in her little handful of hay, and we walk ever so slowly as she holds her bucket filled with a cup of water to take to the cows. Does it make chores take longer? Absolutely. Does she feel like she’s helping out mom and dad? Yes. And that’s perhaps the most important part. She is learning that she is valuable member of the homesteading family, and her contributions are appreciated and valued. Even though it can wear on a parent’s patience and time, we still do this because the value of it far outweighs what would happen if we didn’t.

Find Age-Appropriate Tasks for Your Children

Children want to feel appreciated and valued. If you allow them to help, give them praise and encouragement for helping, and help them to see how much you appreciate them, they’ll want to continue to help with chores. If they are are made to feel that they don’t do the job good enough, or they feel like they’re making life harder for you as a parent, they probably won’t be very excited when you ask them to do something around the homestead.

Odds are, if children are turned away as a child who is willing but not as capable yet, they will probably not be shy about turning you down later when they’re more capable as an older child.

Find age-appropriate ways to include your children in your homesteading family. Some practical ideas may include:

• Allow children to grow their own small vegetable garden. Give your children an opportunity to grow vegetables and fruit. Serve them fresh at dinner or include them in your preserves for winter. Praise your children for contributing to the family and helping to keep everyone fed and healthy.
• Train your children on how to do chores. Simple chores like getting the chickens water, locking up the coop at night, opening the coop in the morning, or gathering eggs are simple tasks that even little children can be proud to do. Will an egg get broke once and a while? Maybe. Is it ok? Yes. The lessons that they’re being taught are far more important than the ones they would miss out on without the opportunity.
• Praise your children. When your child is ready and willing to help with something and asks, consider taking them up on their offer. If the children ask to help with something, be very careful about saying no based on the fact that it might make things more difficult now. Because odds are, if they’re turned away as a child who is willing but not as capable yet, they will probably not be shy about turning you down later when they’re more capable as an older child.

Benefits of Homesteading as a Family

The benefits of homesteading as a family are wonderful. You have an opportunity to work together and spend time together as a family, teach important values, and support one another when challenges arise. When you live a homesteading life as a family, you may be surprised at the amount of benefits you’ll find your family receiving.

Working together as a family builds relationships

Spending time together and working alongside one another can help give you an opportunity to connect with your family. As you walk with your children collecting sap during maple syrup season, you may find that you can have meaningful conversations that may have otherwise been missed. Or maybe, as you walk in stride with your now-teenager as he carries five gallons pails of water to the barn, you start to recognize your pride in the young man he has become. When an animal dies or something goes wrong on the homestead, your whole family can come together to support one another and move forward.

Relationships can be strengthened when you work alongside each other on a homestead. Spending time together outside, creating food for the family, and working together can give wonderful opportunities for conversations that may otherwise be lost in a technology-driven, ultra-connected world.

Involving children helps promote important values

There is so much to be learned on a homestead, and developing and teaching important values come along with the homesteading family lifestyle.

Giving children responsibility from a young age, then helping them with how to handle that responsibility, produces responsible children. When children can see firsthand the effects of their irresponsibility and how it affects others, they are more likely to be more responsible in the future. For example, if you’ve given your children the responsibility of collecting the eggs and the task doesn’t get done and a hen breaks all the eggs, there is a real-world consequence of that: the family doesn’t have eggs! They will carry that weight of their irresponsibility, and probably won’t want to have that feeling again.

Homesteading families often embrace nature and simple living. When children learn from a very young age how beneficial the earth is, how important the relationships are between the earth, people, and animals, and how little people actually need to survive (and thrive), there is a much greater potential of the children adopting those values too. Allowing children to grow up without all of the distraction of the world can be a really great way to give your children some freedom to be kids.

Remember Why You Started Homesteading in the First Place

Odds are you probably began your homesteading journey because of your children in some way. Maybe you began homesteading before you had children, but you knew you wanted your children to grow up without the distractions of modern day life. Or, perhaps you decided to homestead after having children so that you could provide them with healthy, nourishing food. Whatever drew you to homesteading in the first place, your children were likely an important part of that.

Remember this fact as you work to navigate homesteading family life. Don’t get so distracted and caught up in homesteading life and living that you forget that your family was part of the reason you began in the first place. Keep your family first in your mind, and remember that your homestead (more than likely) is only in existence because of them.

Read more on homesteading family life

• GRIT AND SURVIVAL: LIFE AS A HOMESTEADER THEN VS. NOW
• HOMESTEADING WHILE WORKING FULL TIME: CAN IT BE DONE?
• THIS IS WHAT YOU NEED TO KNOW BEFORE YOU START HOMESTEADING
• MODERN DAY HOMESTEADERS: WHO ARE THEY?
• HOW TO BECOME A HOMESTEADER: HOW THESE FAMILIES STARTED THEIR OWN MODERN DAY HOMESTEADS
• WHY IS SIMPLE LIVING SO HARD IN TODAY’S MODERN WORLD?
• THIS IS WHY SO MANY PEOPLE ARE HOMESTEADING TODAY
• HOW GRATITUDE CAN CHANGE YOUR LIFE | FINDING HAPPINESS WITH GRATITUDE
• BEST QUOTES TO CAPTURE THE REALITY OF HOMESTEADING LIFE
• WHAT DOES THE BIBLE SAY ABOUT HOMESTEADING? | ENCOURAGEMENT ON THE HOMESTEAD
• WHAT 200 HOMESTEADERS WISH THEY WOULD’VE KNOWN WHEN THEY STARTED
• READY TO START HOMESTEADING? LEARN HOW HERE.