How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  What Goes Wrong

  Chores themselves mostly aren’t fun (although they can be). But when children don’t help out with household tasks, their absence, and our resentment, gets in the way of families having fun together and detracts from our children’s sense of being part of a larger whole. Children who don’t do chores also miss out on the chance to make their own fun that much sweeter by adding in the satisfaction that comes from having had a job to do and seeing it through. When we don’t give our children age-appropriate responsibilities (and expect them to fulfill them), we’re not respecting who they are now or the adults they will later become, and we’re leaving them with a sense of being adrift in a world where everyone wants to feel needed.

  We can blame culture, a little bit. If your child is coming home with five hours of homework every night and is in even one sport, that doesn’t leave much time for anything else. If every other child in the community plays three sports a year on top of Kumon and robotics club, you can get sucked into a schedule that makes chores hard to establish without even realizing you’ve been had. And although you should put absolutely no faith at all whatsoever in your child’s declaration that “no one else has to do the dishes,” he may be right—and being part of a community where most kids aren’t expected to contribute around the house does rub off.

  That works the other way around, too. If you’re surrounded by families who respond to your invitations for their child to join yours for a day of sledding with “as soon as he’s done with his chores,” and if your child is seeing friends being told to “clean up your room” and helping with the dinner dishes, your job will be (a little) easier, and when you’re the family that expects children to do their share, you help spread that expectation.

  The sheer effort of getting the children to do the chores is also a big factor in why it just doesn’t happen. Studies show that it takes, on average, five years of nightly nagging before a child will, without a reminder, clear her own plate from the dinner table. The fact that those studies were entirely unscientific and done in my kitchen on a sample set of four should not make you believe in them any less. The struggle is real. It’s easier to do it yourself until, suddenly, it’s not—but if you wait until then to start nagging, you have a rough five years ahead. If you can pay someone to clean your house for you (we do), the load on the parents is lighter, making it even more tempting to skip the nagging and just do it yourself.

  That’s the choice many of us make. Of parents who said they had chores themselves but didn’t expect their kids to do them, 75 percent said they believed regular chores made kids “more responsible” and 63 percent said chores teach kids “important life lessons.” We believe in chores. We talk a good game. But when we look honestly at who’s doing what in our kitchens, laundry rooms, and bathrooms, many of us (including me) struggle to do what it takes to get kids to help at home.

  Research not performed in my kitchen also backs up our instinct that we’re not asking enough of our children. Between 2001 and 2005 a team of researchers from UCLA’s Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) recorded 1,540 hours of footage of thirty-two middle-class, dual-earner families with at least two children, all of them going about their regular business in their Los Angeles homes. They found that the Los Angeles parents did most of the housework and intervened quickly when the kids had trouble completing a task. Children in twenty-two families made it a practice to ignore or resist their parents’ requests for help. In eight families, the parents didn’t actually ask the children to do much of anything. (This research was described by one of the younger social scientists as “the very best birth control ever.”)

  Unfortunately, if you wish your children did more around the house (as I do), the brutal truth is that it’s on us if they don’t. Children whose families have established an expectation that they will contribute to the workings of the household, do—whether it’s a five-year-old in Peru’s Amazon region climbing trees to harvest papayas and “helping haul logs thicker than her leg to stoke a fire” or a seven-year-old doing the household laundry every weekend. They may not whistle while they work; they may require near-constant reminders; they will almost certainly not do the job to your standards without years of training, but children (including mine and yours) can and will do the work if you require it of them.

  There are two ways to make this happen. The first is to make it a priority—to say what you mean and mean what you say around chores, to enforce consequences, to nag, to ground, to request and request and request and never let up—or just do it yourself or conclude that you can live with unmade beds or un-put-away laundry.

  This first course takes serious dedication. You’re swimming against the tide—most parents, as I’ve said, don’t pull this off (and as you’ll see as you read further, I’m still working on it). I suspect it’s worth it, and the parents I’ve talked to whose children (after years of training) genuinely do regular chores with efficiency, if not grace, assure me that it is so.

  The second way to get your children to do chores is to need the help—and this is why middle- and upper-class families with two healthy parents are at a rare disadvantage, and one few would want to change. If you can’t manage without help because one parent is chronically ill, because you’re a single parent, or because you’re working two jobs just to keep the basics covered, your children are more likely to step up. They will learn to prepare food, produce clean laundry, and take care of younger children. This can be a bad thing (see Jeannette Walls’s memoir, The Glass Castle), or it can be a good thing (think Mary and Laura in Little House on the Prairie). It can also be a bad thing that leads to good things.

  You can’t, and wouldn’t want to, artificially create a situation in which your life demanded that your three-year-old boil her own hot dogs, as Jeannette Walls describes (she was badly burned as a result). But watch. There will come a time when you are faced with an injured family member or animal, or your car goes off the driveway into a snowdrift, or you are traveling alone with four young children and one toddler is barfing and the baby is crying and the preschooler needs to go poop. At that moment, you will look at whatever child is even close to physically capable of whatever you need and you will say, “I cannot do this without you.” And that child will perform miracles.

  You can be very, very glad that you’re not in that place very often—but recognize that the capable child who comes through in a pinch is the same child sitting at the dinner table reading a comic book while you clear and wash the dishes generated by the meal you cooked half an hour ago. He is not physically different from the children born to less who do more, or the kids from that big family down the street who are always so polite and helpful when they come over.

  All of which means that, as much as we don’t want to, we really need to nudge that child up and teach him to properly load the dishwasher—which also means we must find a way to get over our own distaste for the task. In my research, I asked 1,050 parents an open-ended question: what do you least like about parenting? The most popular answer, without contest, was “discipline” in various forms, and that included enforcing chores and other responsibilities. Among the things we don’t like? “Enforcing the rules, especially about household chores,” the challenges of “chores and disciplining a child,” and having to nag kids to do simple chores. Many parents wish they had begun enforcing the rules and started a routine of chores earlier when their kids were younger instead of “fighting teeth and nails to get something done” when they are older. We may think our children should do chores, but we really don’t want to have to make them—but it’s worth noting that we don’t like “doing all the chores myself” either.

  We will all, parents and children alike, be happier if we parents overcome our reluctance to be the chore enforcer. “It’s not good for kids to be outside playing and Mom to be inside doing all the work,” said Jennifer Flanders. “They benefit more from helping and from working side by side with
us, and then we can all play together.” Children who help more at home feel a larger sense of obligation and connectedness to their parents, and that connection helps them connect to others and weather life’s more stressful moments—in other words, it helps them be happier. Their help, even when it’s less than gracious, helps us be happier, too. We know we shouldn’t shoulder all the work of the household alone, and we know, too, that children raised to get up and help when there is work to be done become a more productive part of any group they join.

  “We want to raise our children with joy,” said Flanders, and that means building a family that works together to sustain and support one another. “I don’t want to be a martyr, always complaining about all the work the kids create. Why would you raise kids you’re not happy to live with?”

  When Should Chores Start for Kids?

  The short answer to that question is now. Although it’s never too late to start, the younger kids are when we create an expectation that they’ll help around the house, the better. If you’re doing work that’s necessary to the running of the house and your children are sitting and watching (or more likely, sitting nearby and watching something else), get them up and get them involved.

  Wondering what kids can do? Probably more than you think. Look back in time a little, or even just to your own childhood, and ask yourself—when did kids start milking cows and churning butter? Mowing the lawn? Washing the dishes? Usually, the answer is something like “As soon as they could do so safely,” an assessment parents once made by working alongside their kids until they felt the kids were ready to take over, allowing the parent to move on to other work.

  “What chores should children do at what ages?” is a common question, and there are plenty of answers (just search “age-appropriate chores” online). But before you do a Web search for a chore list, ask yourself a more localized question. What are you doing when you do the things that make your house run? Are you vacuuming and sweeping? Gathering or folding laundry? Feeding chickens? The question isn’t really what kids can do, it’s what needs to be done at your house. The jobs that absolutely need to be done for your family are the jobs you want to be teaching and eventually delegating, whether they’re as generic as washing dishes or as specific as piloting the houseboat through the lock. This is not about, as one popular chore chart suggested, training a four-year-old to sanitize doorknobs—unless, of course, sanitizing doorknobs takes up a lot of your time. It’s about learning to work together to all make the house run, so that you can all enjoy everything else life has to offer.

  But What About All That Homework?

  Here’s the most common question, or maybe excuse, brought up by parents of older kids who aren’t doing nearly what they could to help the house run smoothly: how can we ask the high schooler who barely got to dinner after sports practice to put in fifteen minutes of kitchen time before setting off for his three hours of homework, especially if, as discussed in Chapter 1, we’re trying to put a family priority on getting enough sleep?

  We can—once we understand that this is truly important. Who do you want this child of yours to grow up to be? Almost all parents respond to surveys and questionnaires by saying they are deeply invested in raising caring, ethical children, and most parents tell researchers that they see these moral qualities as more important than achievement. Other research suggests that many of our children aren’t getting that message. In a survey of more than ten thousand students from thirty-three schools in various regions of this country, Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd found that almost 80 percent valued achievement of their own happiness over caring for others—and what’s more, most thought their parents agreed.

  Although household chores are a small thing, the subtle but pervasive message of requiring them isn’t small at all. Requiring that high schooler to contribute to the family well-being and the smooth running of the household before turning his attention to his books conveys the value you place on that contribution. Schoolwork is important, but so is your place in this family community. You’re not saying “you must do dishes instead of homework” (although it’s likely your high schooler will claim to see it that way). You’re saying “you must find a way to balance these competing responsibilities that does not shirk your role as part of this family.”

  It’s so, so tempting to give the kid a pass, and so hard to see how often we hand over that get-out-of-chores-free card. But what you want now isn’t always what you want later. “Our interviews and observations over the last several years also suggest that the power and frequency of parents’ messages about achievement and happiness often drown out their messages about concern for others,” says Dr. Weissbourd. Your “message” about helping to care for one’s family needs to be repeated often, especially if it involves doing the dishes.

  But what if that fifteen minutes a night leads to a B in Spanish, which is ultimately the reason the Harvard admissions office—home of the noted researcher Richard Weissbourd, quoted earlier—puts your snowflake in the “no” drift?

  You can’t look at it that way. (Note that if I didn’t sometimes lean toward looking at it that way myself, it probably wouldn’t occur to me.) You do not just want to raise the child you can hothouse and coddle into the Ivy League. You want to raise the adult who can balance a caring role in the family and community with whatever lifetime achievement goals he chooses. Teaching that balance has value. Asking—and expecting—children to contribute is important. One small longitudinal study, done over a period of twenty-five years, found that the best predictor for young adults’ success in their midtwenties was whether they participated in household tasks at age three or four. That researcher, Marty Rossmann, used data from a long-term study that her own family had participated in, which included questions about children’s participation in family work at ages three to four, nine to ten, and fifteen to sixteen, along with a brief phone interview when child participants were in their twenties. She found that earlier work meant more, helping children to internalize the idea that household responsibilities are shared responsibilities—which extended, then, to a sense of responsibility and empathy in other areas of their lives.

  I don’t want to make too much of a small study, and there’s really no need. All the research in this area does is confirm what we already know. The new boyfriend who rises to help his hosts clear the table when meeting his partner’s family, the young employee who steps up to help employees in other jobs, the student who doesn’t just finish her lab work but makes sure her work area is ready for the next class—those kids are more self-sufficient, better prepared for adulthood, and more successful in relationships with family and friends. Success is not all about gold stars and letter grades.

  So How Do We Make Chores Happen?

  Our family history of chores is mixed. Our kids do farm work that most others don’t, which they would argue should count when I’m considering how much they help around the house (I disagree). For household chores, though, I’d rate my performance at about a C. I suspect we’re average, my husband and I. We have tried every single available system for assigning and enforcing chores, and after more than fifteen years as parents, we achieved children who mostly clear their own dishes, including one who does it every time and one who has to be reminded almost every time. That was it. They knew how to do a variety of other things, particularly cooking things, which might go on the credit side of our ledger, but they do not actually do them unless we demand it, or at least not in a useful way. (Okay, brownies are useful. But it’s just not what I mean.)

  They fed the dogs and cats and chickens, albeit with much stomping and dish slamming and grumping about siblings who didn’t have to do the job when it was their week and the general unfairness of a life that includes opening a can of cat food once daily. I’d estimate that I chose to feed the animals myself rather than endure the fuss about half of the time. Maybe more often. There was a child assigned to empty the dishwasher daily, to set the ta
ble, to clear the table, to do the dishes, and to take out the trash—but if we didn’t demand that those things happen, they didn’t.

  What had we tried? Star charts. Reward chips that could be cashed in at the Mom Store. Fines for failure to perform. Bonuses for stellar performance. Offering their allowance in the form of single dollars in a cup and taking a dollar out every time a chore wasn’t done. Docking allowances for complaining about chores. Countless other strategies that I have forgotten.

  Here’s what I’ve learned, through my own experience and interviews with other parents: any of those things can work. So why didn’t they work for us? Because we didn’t stick with them. We got tired of the effort of implementing the charts. We foolishly promised rewards that involved things like trips to the ice-cream store that we did not want to do. We got angry and punished inconsistently. And, again and again, we gave up, and no one was happy—because as much as they fussed about chores, the kids didn’t want to have to watch us griping about doing them, either. It started to seem as though “happy” was unobtainable.

  Have we found a way to make it better? Yes. And we certainly got happier—kids and parents alike. Some families really have got it figured out—they’ve established routines that have been working decently for years; they’re comfortable with the amount of reminding required, and their family is in a good place with this one.