Teaching Your Children to Work is Hard Work!

This may sound crazy, but  teaching my children to work hard it is  hard work! In the end, you would think that it would lighten my load and make life easier on me, but I find that it is a continual effort on my part to have my children do work.  Let me explain with a story:
The other day, I decided that it was time to clean my oldest sons room thoroughly.  Now, I thought about going in and just tearing the room apart and putting it all back together myself, but realized that this was a great teaching opportunity.  So, I grabbed my son and said: "Let's work on your room together!"  Now, one of the areas that he needed some instruction in was putting away his laundry properly.  For a while now I have been giving him his clean, folded clothes (stacked in the same order as the drawers that they go in) and have had him put them away.  But recently, I have notices that his clothes have not been put into the proper drawers and they were not fitting in the drawers and some things were even ending up on the floor instead of in the drawers.  So, in order to get him to do things properly I had to make sure that he had been thoroughly instructed in the art of putting away laundry. 
The first step was to remove all of the clothing out of the drawer.  I could have done this rather quickly on my own, but I had my son do it all and I waited!  When he finally got all of the clothes put onto his bed, I had him separate everything into piles.  Pants, shirts, shorts, PJ's, etc.  Again, if I had been doing it on my own, I probably would have skipped this step all together, but for his sake I had him do it as I waited!  Next, we worked on folding.  If any of you have ever taught your children how to fold laundry you will know that this takes loads and loads of patience.  There were so many times that I wanted to just take an item from his hands and fold it myself, but how would that help him in the future, when he may be on his own, or his wife may need his help.  So, we painstakingly folded each article of clothing.  Then, I stacked the items, in much the same way that I would normally stack them after folding and I taught him how to separate the stack neatly (which ended with a few items needing to be refolded!) and put them away.  Again, I could have done this all so much faster!!! But, in the end, he learned so many important things. 
That was just one step of cleaning his room.  We also cleaned out his toy bin, sorted the toys, vacuumed, changed the sheets, made the bed.  Many of these things had to be taught.  Now, I had taught him some of these things in the past, but he got sloppy, or he forgot and had to be reminded.  As you can see, it was a very time consuming process.  So, why didn't I just do it myself?  Why would I force a CHILD to WORK? 
As I was teaching my son, I realized that what I was doing was exactly what God would have me to do.  It wasn't easy on me or him.  But, it was so necessary!  I had a long list of things that I needed to get accomplished that day, I didn't get everything crossed off of my list like I may have had I done every job on my own, but my son also would not be as equipped for life had I chosen the easy route.  If you asked my son if he felt that he had been treated unfairly or worked to hard, he might say yes and laugh (because he is a little joker), but if you asked him to answer seriously, he would tell you that he is enjoying his clean room and likes knowing how to better keep it that way!  I said all this to say that as parents, it is often so tempting to take the easy route and just clean up after the kids yourself, or cook supper without allowing them to enter the kitchen, or to stack the firewood without having to trip over a kid you didn't see underneath you.  But, in the long run, you are only hurting yourself and them!  In what area can you help your child learn today?  Will you take the time and extra effort to teach them?
Jacinda