Week 10

This week we talked in class about the role of a father and how important it is to have a father in the lives of children in the home and it really hit home for me. I really liked how Brother Williams started out by sharing statistics, and then went into how it is important from a religious perspective and then you had us talk about how we can get our families working together early on. I know that from personal experience that having my dad there all the time really helped me out because I was able to learn so many things from him. For example, hard work; we worked together as a family every weekend and sometimes we loved it and sometimes we didn’t, but we were able to learn from our parents. Elder Robert D. Hales of the Quorum of the twelve apostles said, “Work together as a family even if you are able to get it done quicker yourself.” Going back to working together as a family every weekend… Dad knew a lot and he often had to teach us how to do things even if he could get it done quicker by himself. He taught us last four girls how to change the oil on a car, even though it took twice as long. He taught us how to rotate tires on the vehicles, he taught us how to take care of the yard and assigned jobs such as mowing; he often timed us because he said he could do it faster. He taught us what service was and helped us reach out to our neighbors, young and old, to prune their trees, or mow their lawns. We had an elderly widow woman that lived across the street from us growing up and mom and dad had us going over to her house at least three times a week just to talk to her and see how she was doing and help her with things that need to be done that she couldn’t do on her own. The four of us girls would go over every Friday after school or Saturday morning and mow her front and back yard, and she would come out and watch us laugh and giggle as we took care of her yard. She even let us plant a garden in her backyard, so as a family we did the prep work, planted, and took care of the garden we had planted. Through these experiences our dad was there, and was willing to help when we needed it. Having a father in the home is important for a child’s growth. Without that connection of a father a child misses out on a lot. I think it is important to have a father in the home because it has helped me in my life.