Hard work always yields good fruit. If a student works tirelessly throughout the year, he/she comes out with flying colours at the end of the year. Bearing fruit/good results can be perceived not merely in mark sheets, as we normally think, but through life orientation and in different facets in his/her life. Marks can be obtained by rote without understanding the core essence of the subject studied.
Hard working children really grow and learn several positive things in their life. They know to face different challenges of their lives. They acquire more than sufficient stamina to face unprecedented failures/challenges in their way to achievement. They become pure and complete like that of gold in the furnace. They find different methods/ways to face challenges that they come across. They don’t get disheartened for any minor criticisms that they face.
Role of Parents/Guardians/Elders:
It’s an axiomatic truth that parents are required to look after the welfare of their children. But, this doesn’t mean that they have to provide every possible luxury to their children or whatever children demand. Normally, there is an attitude among parents, in general, that as they were not in a position to afford certain luxuries in their younger age, their children must not be deprived of the same; luxuries which they themselves were unable to get.
As responsible parents, if you pose for a while and think about the pros and cons of it, I think, you would certainly don’t regret for what you didn’t get at that age. Honestly you must think, if ever you are something today, it is due to non-availability of those luxurious gadgets or life during those days. It is your hard work and ambitious thinking towards building up your own life with struggles provided you an opportunity to grow to this stature. So, it is the hard work that bears fruit in once life and not what one gets from one’s parents or society. It is said, ‘Don’t give your children fish to eat but teach them to catch some. If you give fish, certainly it exhausts within no time but if you teach them to catch fish, it lasts for long.
Therefore intellectuals opine, ‘what you get from others or society is not important but what values you render to the society is important’. If we wait for others or society to provide us everything without making much efforts, we remain as beggars and will not grow as achievers. So we need to make our children and youngsters as hard working generation to earn their status and reputation rather than providing every luxury in life to become waste bodies or national waste.
Let us build our children for the better society by teaching them to work hard and be responsible for their life.
-Fr. Francis Assisi Almeida, Mangalore
