Here’s what those parents had to say about making chores a happier part of family life, and how we used their advice to change.
THEY’RE NOT CHORES, THEY’RE LIFE SKILLS
Laundry, loading a dishwasher, cooking a meal, keeping a living space orderly—when you do them, they’re chores. But when you teach your children to do them, they’re life skills. Cleaning a shower is not rocket science, but it does require some coaching, starting with the fact that a shower—which is just filled with soap and water, right?—has to be cleaned at all. You don’t want to raise that roommate you once had who put greasy dishes in the cabinet because he didn’t know how to wash them, or the babysitter who made boxed macaroni and cheese for my children by opening the box and the cheese packet, pouring both into the pan, adding water and then turning on the heat.
Looked at that way, it’s easier to see the persistence it’s going to take to persuade your child to do a job correctly, without you standing over her, in a different light. Restoring a kitchen to order after a meal is a skill adults need—as is the acceptance that sometimes you do that even though you do not want to. Even though you are tired, or would rather watch TV, or still have work to do, you still get the taco stains and shredded cheese off the counter.
In her book How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen at Stanford University, described the life-skill-building strategy a friend developed for building skills in children:
First we do it for you.
Then we do it with you.
Then we watch you do it.
Then you do it yourself.
It’s easier to get our kids through those first four steps when we remind ourselves that if we don’t, they’ll start off at step five in a dorm room or an apartment filled with empty food containers and unwashed dishes: you deal with the cockroaches.
STICK WITH IT AND THEN STICK WITH IT SOME MORE
I was joking earlier in the chapter when I said it took five years for a child to learn to clear a plate from the table without being asked—but I might not be far off. Most parents whose kids do specific chores regularly describe a process that takes not days or weeks, but months, and probably years, no matter when you start.
“My son has to clean his room, water the plants, and clean the toilets before he is allowed screen time on weekends,” Sarah Maxell Crosby, a mother in White River Junction, Vermont, said. “We’ve been doing this for about two years; he’ll be seven this month. For several months, he would drag it out, not getting screen time until Sunday afternoon, or at all, if he was really resistant, but we stuck to our guns, and the time to completion became shorter. Now, most Saturdays, he has finished his chores before I even wake up.”
She’s describing a process that took months to implement and more than a year to feel confident in. Other parents say much the same. “It took time and persistence.” “Reiteration and patience.” “Training and follow-up.” “Tolerating the complaints and resistance.” “I did have to hang in there for a lot of whining and incompetence for a while.” “My kids are now ten and fifteen—they’ve been assigned simple chores forever, but it’s taken this long to have some peace with some of them!!” Parents who stop and start, change chores and strategies, and give up and do it all themselves for months on end—like me—will find themselves, as I have, back at square one again and again.
Deborah Gilboa, the pediatrician whose youngest child, at seven, is responsible for the family laundry (and whose three older children manage other tasks that help the whole household), says sticking to the plan (without making it bigger than it has to be) has been a key to her family’s success. “I don’t expect them to enjoy it,” she says. She just expects them to do their part. Over the years, the family has learned that while some flexibility is required, adjusting to changing schedules doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t contribute. If a child who is expected to empty the dishwasher will be gone all day and the dishwasher has run, “I’ll throw them some compassion,” she says, but that favor—emptying the dishwasher so that others can fill it—comes with a text offering a choice of other things that need to be done.
Julie Lythcott-Haims says she didn’t really begin to require chores with any consistency until her children were ten and twelve (not so coincidentally, about when she began writing her book). “They were all, ‘WHAT?!’” she says. Now fifteen and seventeen, they need little reminding to do their own chores (laundry, taking the trash bins to the curb, setting and clearing the table, unloading the dishwasher, and dealing with trash and recycling). “It’s fun to hear them negotiating over whose turn it is to do what. And my elder is great at doing things ‘for’ the younger to be nice.”
Which sounds fantastic—but don’t focus on whether your kids would ever reach the point of helping one another out with chores. Focus on the fact that even someone who literally wrote the book on raising independent kids didn’t start her kids off as young as she wished she had, and had to go through the same long days, weeks, months, and years of prodding that we all do before it got better. You don’t have to get it right every time. When it comes to getting kids to do chores, you just have to keep trying.
MAKE CHORES A HABIT, AND GIVE THE HABIT TIME TO STICK
When I first set up our chores, they were a timing mishmash. The child assigned to “laundry” could arguably do it any time, while the child feeding the dog needed to perform precisely at six (our dogs can tell time better than I can in that respect). Then I read Gretchen Rubin’s book on forming habits, Better Than Before, along with Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, and realized that I was inadvertently making it harder to turn chores into any kind of a routine. The regular chores now come paired with a repeated activity, one to be done as soon as you get downstairs in the morning, one right before dinner, and one after dinner. It’s easier to do something every day than once in a while. Tying a chore to something that happens daily makes it much easier to remember.
But for a habit to stick, it has to be practiced regularly. The parents I spoke to who were happiest about the ways their children contributed to the running of the house didn’t assign daily chores, or weekly chores, or even monthly chores.
They assigned a chore for a year. A year.
A year of laundry. A year of lunch-making. A year of loading the dishwasher after dinner. That’s true in pediatrician Deborah Gilboa’s family, and in Jennifer Flanders’s large family as well (Flanders runs the Flanders Family Homelife website, a resource with a Christian message for homeschoolers and large families). More than two decades ago, when her children’s ability to make messes outpaced her ability and willingness to clean them up, Flanders decided to abandon her mother’s approach (“to let them help when they wanted to help”) in favor of a system she hoped would teach all of her kids, regardless of gender, to do everything that has to be done to run a household. Every child is expected to keep a tidy room and to make the bed daily; beyond that, each has a responsibility for the year: set the table, load the dishwasher, sort the laundry, etc.
“By the time the year is over, they’re efficient and they’ve stopped complaining,” she says. “Sometimes they’ve come up with a way to do it that’s better than mine.”
Giving a child a chore for the year means that chore can really become an established part of the routine, for both parent and child. It also puts a little more slack in the system—feeding the dogs Friday night because a child is at a soccer game isn’t as big a deal if that child still has 364 days of dog-feeding ahead. “I’ll sometimes just help out, and sometimes I’ll tell them that because they weren’t there to do it, they’ve got something else to do,” says Flanders. A full year of a chore gives a child the opportunity to really master both the chore itself and the will it takes to get up and do it over and over and over again.
Flanders gives easier jobs to younger children (sometimes manufacturing a job for a child that’s too youn
g for most things) and graduates them to more difficult chores as they age. At the end of the year, “they do get a little bit of say in what they get next, but not much,” she says. Eventually everyone gets every job and learns to do it right.
In the Flanders family, most chores are done at the same time, usually daily, and the family works together to get all the jobs done, a routine that keeps the kids on track. Deborah Gilboa ties the timing of weekly chores to privileges. In her son’s case, it’s “no screens on Sunday until the laundry is done”—a particular challenge, she says, if there’s a football game on. On weekdays, chores must be done before anyone can play or have screen time.
“I think one important thing, though, is that I don’t get offended when they don’t remember,” she says. “But I don’t ever let them off the hook.”
That’s a message echoed by many parents, and a reassuring one. When it comes to chores, it’s important to separate two goals—that our children do the work, and that they remember to do the work without prompting. Both are great, but it’s getting the job done consistently that really matters.
“As long as they do it, I wouldn’t feel bad about having to ask every single time,” Susan D’Entremont, a mother in Albany, told me. “My oldest is eighteen and she’s finally started doing things without being asked.” Doing it without being reminded can wait until the next battle.
EXPECT HELP
One friend wrote this on Facebook:
My kids have been doing chores since they were tiny. They all unload the dishwasher if it is full of clean dishes, do their own laundry, make their beds, clean communal areas, and take out recycling and garbage without being reminded. My youngest daughter loves to sweep the foyer and my older daughter cooks if I am not feeling well. The boys are college age but still mow the yard in the summer and spring. I don’t know why they are like this. They have never been paid to do chores or rewarded for it. I have always told them we are a team and that every team member plays an important role in making the family run smoothly. I also have always done chores with them. So . . . yeah. I don’t know, but I am grateful. Also, my kids are typical teens and young adults. We butt heads and argue. We are far from perfect . . . but they do chores and four of five have jobs outside the home. Personality maybe. Other responders have mentioned consistency. That is also a huge part of it.
She doesn’t know why her kids are the way they are—but I do. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that they wouldn’t help, and so they do. Hers is a large family, with a strong tradition of service based on their religious faith, and they are surrounded by a community with similar values. Hard work is part of the package.
For some families, the expectation that everyone will contribute seems to be baked in. It can come with religious practice, yes, as it does with my friend and with the Flanders family, but it can also come with a sustainable living ethos, or farm work, or a home or family business. There’s something about an accepted need to all pull together that turns kids into part of the team. I’ve singled out this friend, but I’ve seen it again and again, and I imagine you have, too—the children in the family that runs the local restaurant, or the CSA, or whose single mother runs a sales business out of their home—those children know how to work, and they do. But if that’s not your family, you can still use the mind-set. Farms, family businesses, family service work—those take a lot of effort, but so does running any household. It takes everyone.
You can declare it a need, and even tie it to a change in your life, if there’s a reason you’re looking to your kids for more help. Or you can just own your previous failures. Jessica Lahey, my friend and neighbor and author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Let Go So Children Can Succeed, told her two sons that she’d been doing too much for them, and it was time for that to change (proving, as with Julie Lythcott-Haims, that there is nothing like writing a book about raising children with life skills to light a fire under a parent). Expect help. Demand it, insist on it, stand over your children until they give it. You deserve their support—and they deserve to be allowed to contribute, even if they don’t think they want to.
DON’T PAY KIDS FOR CHORES UNLESS YOU’D PAY SOMEONE ELSE
Parents who give their children an allowance tend to fall into two camps—those who consider the allowance an exchange for chores, and those who do not. My New York Times colleague Ron Lieber, the author of The Opposite of Spoiled, has convinced me to remain firmly in the non-payment camp. In his view, an allowance is a tool to teach children to value and manage money, while chores are an expectation for anyone who is a part of the family.
Why? In part, because if you’re “paying” your kids to do chores, there will likely come a point when they’ll just shrug. Fine. Take it away, I have the money Grandma sent me for my birthday, or I don’t want to buy anything anyway. More importantly, although getting paid for work is a part of adult life, most chores fall into the category of things we do without pay, like brushing our teeth and feeding our pets (or, for that matter, our children). “I don’t even get out of bed unless I get paid” may make a funny T-shirt, but it’s a terrible approach to life.
That said, there are times when you will pay a child to do a chore. At our house, I’ll pay a kid for some things I’d pay an adult to do, like lawn work, although I don’t pay older children for babysitting younger ones. I might pay a child to do a sibling’s chore, if the task was large enough and the sibling unavailable (usually those chores involve chickens and a driving snowstorm). Once I paid a kid five bucks to make me a batch of Rice Krispies treats. (What can I say? I had a craving. You do you.) Lieber agrees that some things are worth paying for. He had a great suggestion for “big, nasty, one-off chores” that I’ll be trying: “Post the chore with green cash money pinned to a bulletin board—first kid to complete the task gets the money.”
He also endorses paying for excellent work—a performance bonus, if you will, for, say, a week of doing a chore without being reminded, or picking up the slack for an injured sibling.
It’s tempting to take allowance away for excessive complaining or for not getting the work done, although I haven’t found that to be a successful tactic (maybe because I’m usually doing it in anger). “We also dock allowance if chores are not done competently or for too much complaining. But this doesn’t work as well as the more positive strategies,” says Patty Chang Anker, a mother of two from Westchester County, New York. Taking away allowance after the fact doesn’t really help you achieve the goal of a child who gets the chores done, and it lets a parent off the hook for the hard work of enforcing the requirement that a child contribute at the moment when the contribution is necessary. It’s a cop-out, and that (along with our inconsistent application) is probably why it doesn’t work.
WORK TOGETHER, OR ALL AT THE SAME TIME
“We have Power Hour on the weekend for chores,” says Shannan Ball Younger, a mother in Naperville, Illinois. “It’s scheduled, not every single weekend but at least twice a month, and everyone participates.” That rhyme is popular. “We do an ‘hour of power’ on Friday nights where everybody spends one hour diligently cleaning/decluttering and then we all watch a movie afterward,” says Liz Whalley, a mother of two from Seattle.
Also popular is the idea of all doing the chores together, at a set time, for a set time, often with music or a fun reward to follow. “We didn’t hire a cleaning person when we moved to a new city,” says Abby Klemmer, a mother in Birmingham, Michigan. “Now, every two weeks we do a family cleanup day. My kids clean their bedrooms and bathrooms, change their bed linens, vacuum. We do pay them a few dollars for this, but it’s not optional.”
“It’s amazing how much can get done in a relatively brief amount of time and it helps with the idea of ‘we all live here so we all pitch in,’” says Younger. In Berryville, Arkansas, Laura Hudgens’s three kids work in rotating zones—the kitchen, the living spaces, and the entrance to their home. When they were y
ounger, every day at four o’clock they did a “twenty-minute tidy” in their zones, but as they got older and busier, the time became hard to stick to and the plan slipped. This year, Hudgens reinstated it, but she now allows the kids to choose when they work. “One of the best things about zones is how it frees me from having to worry about assigning chores,” she says. “I don’t have to think about whose turn it is to vacuum or clean out the lint trap. And the kids have already stopped arguing about that kind of thing.”
As Laura discovered, keeping to a set time weekly gets more difficult with older, more active children, but if you can find a time that works for almost everyone almost every week, that will do, and work much better than rescheduling chore time every week. Consistency is your friend, and a moving target will probably never be hit in this instance. It will involve complaining, almost every week, almost certainly, about whatever child “never has to do their share,” but it’s not as if there would be no complaining if everyone were present. They’d just be complaining about something else.
CONSEQUENCES
In our house, if you fail to do your own personal “chores” well, or at all (like putting your own hockey gear in the bag that needs to be brought to your practice after school, or putting last night’s homework in your backpack), it comes with natural consequences. I have accidentally put many an assignment in the recycling—easily fished out, yes, but since it’s not sitting on the counter to remind you, it probably doesn’t get turned in on time. And it’s unlikely that I, who played hockey only briefly, will manage to take every single piece of gear off the drying rack (there are so many), and that I’ll be able to pick out your shin guards from your sister’s (gross!). And I certainly won’t check to see if you got it all in your bag. Both that job, and the consequences, are on you.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 6