Sometimes the rewards don't happen until later. I'd like for my children to have experience with working towards things for which the rewards are not immediate, because deep into the agonies of university finals week, late in a sleepless night with a teething child, and during crunch times in whatever work they choose, that understanding will be crucial to helping them find meaning in what is objectively, a painful situation. I suspect that one of the ways we can help our children is by helping them to seek the meaning of the tasks they are assigned, and by being frank about those tasks which have no apparent meaning. And I'd have to say that it is disrespectful to any human to ask them to spend the majority of their time on the planet doing things which do not have meaning. Meaning is what lets one perceive rewards which are concurrent with struggle.
Meaning is what sees one through struggles which offer no immediate rewards.
I want for my kids to be able to discriminate between hard and meaningless, and to find vocations in which their work is meaningful to them. And I wonder if they can be expected to make that distinction if they spend their days neither working hard, nor facing meaningful work. Meaning is my new rallying point at school. To those who say that children must tolerate a certain level of boredom, I reply that boredom is one thing, meaninglessness is another. Doing laundry is boring, but there is meaning to providing my family with clean and comfortable clothing.