Cultivating a Love for Home in Your Daughters
There’s something I have sadly noticed. There aren’t many young women who are good at being homemakers. They weren’t raised to keep their homes clean and tidy. They fail to look well to the ways of their household. No, they were raised to pursue a career, instead, since this has value in our culture and not homemaking.
When they are home full time with their children, their homes are a mess and they don’t like to be home often. They have no will nor desire to keep their homes clean. Where are the mothers who should have trained up their daughters in the fine arts of homemaking? Why aren’t the daughters, when they are young, right by their mother’s side as they cook and clean?
Chris Starr preached a great sermon called Biblical Womanhood and spoke about this topic. (It is well worth your time to listen to the entire sermon.) “All of you single ladies, I want to talk to you for a second. Be careful of filling your life with all kinds of pursuits that substitute for you learning how to take care of a home and enjoying that.
“Many young women have struggled with this. They don’t like being at home. They don’t like caring for the home. They don’t like homemaking. They don’t see it as a worthy profession and every young lady who is not married should be cultivating desires to be and to take care of a home. Mothers should help cultivate this…Your home is a priority and it needs to be taken care of by the woman. There’s no doubt about that. You should be cultivating a love for the home even as a single young lady. The home is the woman’s primary place of ministry. Young women need to be taught to be keepers at home.”
Do you have a love for home? Are you cultivating a love for motherhood, marriage, and homemaking (the most important ministries in the world) in your daughters instead of a desire for college and careers as our culture is doing? If you aren’t, you have some work to do! Are you training your daughters to be godly wives by the way you love and live in submission to your husband? This is the single most important thing you can do for them.
If you train them from a young age to cook, clean, and enjoy being home with you, they will grow up to want to cook, clean, and be in their own homes serving their families. It will come naturally to them. Anything that can be learned and trained as a child is much easier to want to do and do well than it is trying to discipline oneself as an adult.
If you raise your daughters to be clean and tidy and enjoy cooking, they will most likely grow up to be clean and tidy and enjoy cooking. Make sure that you are cheerful when you are teaching them. Show them the joy of the Lord living in and through you while you go about your homemaking!
Train up a child in the way he should go: and when he is old, he will not depart from it.
Proverbs 22:6
11 thoughts on “Cultivating a Love for Home in Your Daughters”
My 16 year old daughter has Down Syndrome and there is nothing that she loves more than helping me around the house. She will get mad if I start the laundry without her because it is her favorite job. She loves to help me cook and bake as well. She has OCD, and I don’t say this tongue in cheek because she really does have OCD (this term is overly used, in my opinion, to describe people who like to keep things tidy…and it diminishes the real diagnosis which is what my daughter has), so having a messy home is not an option for us, as clutter and disorder causes her to have a lot of anxiety. Oh, and she also loves to serve her daddy. She brings him his pajamas at the end of the day, she is quick to get him something to drink and she likes to make sure that he has his lunch ready in the morning before he goes to work. Even though she will always live with us, I love to see how she has such joy in being a woman and a homemaker. She is a reflection of true Godly womanhood!
Wow! What a blessing your daughter is to your family and an example to all of us of serving others cheerfully and willingly. Thank you for sharing.
My mother was a homemaker and raised all of her children, girls and boys, to clean and cook. Most of us still keep a tidy house. 🙂 My sister’s house is always spotless. Mine is usually a bit rumpled because my husband and I are out in the greenhouse, barn and garden most of the day most days. 🙂
Thanks, Lori. You have such motivating posts! They always make me so happy in my role as wife, mother, and keeper at home!?Even though I was not raised in a Christian home, my mother was an amazing housekeeper. Despite coming home to conflict and dysfunction, I appreciated the physical surroundings of an orderly home. It was the one thing I could count on. My dear mom passed that good trait on to me. Praise the Lord!
I went to the dentist with my youngest daughter yesterday. She is 5 years old.
The dentist lady asked her at some point in the talk what she wants to be
when she is an adult. ( My daughter was very patient at the dentist and enjoyed to see how they work there, so she thought may be she wants to become a dentist later…)
But the outcome was quite different.
My daughter answered very firm: “I want to become a family!”
The dentist lady didn’t really understand, but I will never forget this sentence.
How precious! We must have done something right by GODs grace.
Thank you so much for all the encouraging posts, Lori!!!
I am eternally grateful for your godly teaching here.
It’s so true. I was raised to be a working woman. At age 18 I had no idea about cooking, baking, cleaning, homemaking. I was lazy, because my mom made for me everything. I was like a little child. And I thought that I was lucky because everybody said that homemaking is boring, exhausting and makes women inferior. But studying and working…! That’s a thing.
But God’s grace is wonderful. I became His follower as a teenager, married my one and only at age 20 and now I’m 25, have 2 sons and pregnant with my 3rd. But the first years of my marriage and motherhood were so hard. God showed me that my vocation is to be a wife, mother and homemaker, and He wants me to be at home in my whole life. But I was trained to feel cooking, cleaning etc. boring things, plus I had no idea about homemaking, plus I had a little baby who of course made everything harder. And sadly I was a lazy internet addict with no self-control. But God helped me so much! Now I’m a better homemaker, I can cook, I’ve learned how to knit and crochet, how to make a cream for my children with sensitive skin, I spend less time online, and the best thing that I already LIKE homemaking! I can see that it’s such an important service. I like to be at home with my family. I know that I must learn a lot but I enjoy this process. I’m so grateful to God for changing my attitude and behaviour. And thank you too, Lori, because you have a great part of it!
Gazella,
Thankyou for sharing. Im a decade older and i just had my 10th, but i still learned something very special from your testimony. God bless you and your family.
Thank you for your kind words. God bless you and your family too!
Similar case here, Gazella! The Lord is amazing!
You are blessed!
I’d encourage you to continually immerse yourself in homemaking teachings. Go to the library and get books on homemaking, homesteading etc. Some of them will be older books written years ago and they are priceless gems. Involve your children in each new thing you learn and attempt to do. And, please consider home education for your beloved children too :). You will be so amazed, as you soak up the Word of God and learning homemaking skill together, at the people your children grow up to be. And they will be a blessing to the family, the community, and the Lord! Bless you on this journey….it is an exciting and rewarding one!