See also this piece about Mexican Maya practices around chores — essentially, letting toddlers exercise their innate desire to be helpful by having them participate in housework, even though they are clumsy and slow.
The distilled advice:
1. Expose kids to chores as much as possible.
2. Think small tasks, big contributions (The task can be tiny, but the key part is that it has to make a real contribution to the chore, not “mock work”)
3. Always aim to work together
4. Don't force it
5. Change your mindset about young children (Don’t assume toddlers and young children simply want to play; they may want to help)
Our two year old has taken it upon himself to feed the dog. He needs help scooping up the food but after that he can (carefully) walk across the room, pour it into the bowl, return the scoop to the bin, close the bin, and then the cupboard door. Sometimes he spills the food. That’s ok, we clean it up together. I have no idea how he learned all these things. We certainly didn’t teach him explicitly.
i still really like this seeing it the second time around.
my mom would just yell at me to do chores but never really enforce a schedule. she gave me allowance regardless. my dad would make me be his helper as he tinkered around the house despite my protestations (it might have worked if he used the tom sawyer whitewashing trick however). he never gave me money.
neither approach worked very well and to this day i dislike routine house work.
I don't know if any parrenting approach can ever make someone like routine housework. Its more about instilling the discipline to do the work in spite of not wanting to, with the reward being a more pleasant household.
> it's important at the beginning to do the chore together
This is very important. Kids are clever and surprisingly capable when they are able to gain some firsthand experience. The problem is they don't actually have that experience. Humans learn by observing and imitating; working together on the same task lets them easily observe in detail from an experienced role model. Immediate feedback lets them rapidly iterate their attempts to imitate their observations.
Victor Wooten gave an outstanding TED talk[1] on this topic[2]:
> If you think about how you learned [to speak English], you realize you weren’t taught it. People just spoke to you. But the coolest thing is [...] you were allowed to speak back.
> Now if I take the music example, in most cases, our beginners are not allowed to play with the better people. You’re stuck in the beginning class. You have to remain there a few years, until you are elevated to the intermediate and then advanced. [...]
> But with language, to use a musical term, even as a baby you’re jamming with professionals, all the time — to the point that you don’t even know you’re a beginner. No one says, “I can’t talk to you until you got to go over there. When you’re older, then I can speak to you.” It doesn’t happen. No one tells you what you have to say. You’re not made to sit in a corner and practice. You’re never even corrected when you’re wrong.
> Think about it, when you’re 2, 3 years old and you say a word wrong over and over, no one corrects you. If you say it wrong enough times, instead of correcting you, your parents learn your way. And they start saying it wrong too.
I like the improve your surroundings idea and try to teach my 7 year old about it. See a dirty dish, don't walk by, wash it, then move on. See dirt on the floor pick it up. Stuff like that.
Cleaning things can be enjoyable. I know because sometimes I feel like doing it and sometimes I don't. It is practically the best barometer of my mental health I know.
To me, it's common sense that people who always do a good job of keeping things clean generally have a desire or at least a compulsion to do it. Just like the vast majority of people who are thin don't have to starve themselves.
Whenever my nephew was throwing a tantrum we would tell him to organize the cupboard with pots and pans, three years old, he could sit there for hours organizing.
> 5. Change your mindset about young children (Don’t assume toddlers and
young children simply want to play; they may want to help)
It always seems to me that kids always start with an innate desire to learn
by mimicking available role models, whether they are parents, older
siblings, or older relatives. It's only after being repeatedly told to go
somewhere else to play and not bother the adults and their work that they
start to look for other ways to spend their time (e.g. by playing or
watching youtube). They realize offers of help are probably going to be
treated as a bother and rejected, and become accustomed to doing other
activities that don't bother the adults. Then, the parent, at some later
point in time, complains that they don't help around the house. They'll
insist their kid to help more, but they're asking him/her to change a habit
of play that's been set since long ago.
That's why I think that one should start teaching life skills as soon as a
child is able and willing to learn them. They might suck at everything at
first and be more bother than help, but that's part of learning and that
bother I think is the burden of parenting.
> 4. Don't force it
Yeah, people don't like doing what they're forced to do, and they'll avoid
what they don't like. It's about understanding that it's a necessity of
life. It's not optional. While the kid's a kid, the parents will be there
to help the kid clean up after his messes and do other things necessary for
his/her life (cooking etc.), but that help won't always be there. So, it's
not about getting the kid to help as much as it is about reducing the
amount of help the kid must receive from his parents. If he's doing chores
that the whole family benefit from, it's to counterbalance the things that
other family members do for him.
I feel much of the conflict in getting kids to do their chores is because
they don't see the logic in fairness behind it, and the benefit that it's
for him/her to learn it. It's a communication problem, which is
understandable because communicating effectively with kids can be hard or
at least different to communicating with adults.
> 2. Think small tasks, big contributions (The task can be tiny, but the
key part is that it has to make a real contribution to the chore, not
“mock work”)
Kids aren't dumb, and pointless work is pointless. As soon as they notice
that the work they're putting in isn't helping anyone, why bother? It's the
feeling of being useful and dependable what we want them to feel. Gratitude
from a loved family member that visibly benefited from his/her work is
nice, too.
> this piece about Mexican Maya practices around chores
I didn't know it came from the Mayans. Is this not common advice?
EDIT: Disclaimer: I don't have kids. This are just my thoughts based on
what I've learned from other parents and their kids.
Some good ideas in here for parents to consider. But take it with a grain of salt. Examples from other cultures where several children are the norm and parents spend more time in the home are ultimately not particularly helpful.
In the end, every child is different, every parent is different, every household is different. No approach works for everyone. My own 17 year old daughter, an only child, has always resisted most household chores in a stubborn passive aggressive manner in the same way I did as a child, but is also nearly entirely unmotivated by monetary rewards, very different from the teenage me. Also unlike me, she is entirely self-disciplined about schoolwork, and learned to do her own laundry years ago (I didn’t until I was forced to by going to college far from home). So my own experience as a child is no help, and neither are articles like this one. And yet I suspect she’s turning out to be quite okay in the end.
I would second this: each family is different. There are many ways to raise disciplined, motivated kids, and chores and allowances are certainly not necessary.
I grew up with strong internal motivation because my parents helped me to see at an early age how hard work of others made them successful. That big mansion in a nearby neighborhood? The result of someone getting an education and working hard. (The adult perspective is that it’s not quite as simple, but it’s close enough.) So I developed a love of learning at an early age, not because of extrinsic rewards, but because it felt good to invest in myself. And it still does.
To my mom, chores took away from study time or (rare) play time, so I was never expected to help. But I did small things when asked to help. My grandmother was aghast that my mom did my laundry until I moved out, and it was pretty easy to learn when I had to. My parents just didn’t think time doing laundry was more important than time learning calculus or playing on the computer. All that unstructured computer time developed my love for technology, and now I own a software company.
They also took my young hopes and dreams seriously, rather than dismissing them since I was a kid. When at 3 years old I said I wanted a specific type of sports car, my mom opened up a savings account in my name, and we asked family never to gift me toys: only deposits into the account. By the time I was old enough to drive, I had a down payment ready to go. I learned the value of delaying instant gratification for a longer term goal.
The most important way to raise healthy, motivated kids, in my mind, is to treat them as young adults and help them become intrinsically motivated.
Thanks for sharing your experience. If you had to pick a couple of things that helped your daughter to become autonomous and responsible individual, what would you point to?
I had a lot of anxiety about chores as a kid. As a child, I wanted to be taught very much to do them, but would get yelled at for being in the middle of things if I tried to insert myself. I guess that later my parents would randomly come up chores on the spot depending on how bad of a mood they were in and how much they wanted to annoy the children. I remember still being interested in doing chores but ended up begging my parents for the household to make some sort of chore chart or something so we could know who does what on what days instead of being randomly ordered to do huge amounts of stuff on no notice alternating with nothing. Unfortunately this was not allowed as my mother thought I would scam them by only doing the chores on the chart and not waiting on their beck and call at all times. Actually, this reminds me of a lot of ineffective managers in retrospect.
My dad was the same way. He constantly complained about me not helping but when we agreed on me helping with something he usually changed the time and then I had already other plans. It was constant drama for really no good reason. He also never showed me how to do something. On the other hand my mom usually discussed what to do, when and how, and things got done with much less friction.
And yes, it really reminds me of some managers that constantly change plans and then are surprised that people don't follow enthusiastically.
I can relate. Especially the pointless drama. I remember dreading yard work, especially having to pick weeds. It felt so pointless and arbitrary -- a real chore.
Years later I was listening to an interview on the radio with a famous naturalist or environmentalist or something. He said his parents wouldn't let him pick a weed if he couldn't identify it. Damn, I thought. That's brilliant. That's the kind of parents I wish I had.
I grew up in one of those "children are meant to be seen, not heard" households, so attempts to be helpful and part of things was always rebuffed with "no you'll just getting in the way and break something". Made resentment of being given chores arbitrarily that much more intense, because why would I want to help now?
Of course, being older now with my own home I work hard to keep things tidy as a point of pride, no kids but if they ever come along I'm going to make sure if they want to help out that they feel involved and maybe learn something in the process-the kind of parents I wish I had.
One thing that helps people's motivation is being willing to explain to them why a task should be done. As a teenager, I was very reluctant to mow the lawn for years when the reason was "I told you so". I just didn't know what the benefit of mowing a lawn was and I didn't know how to persuade my parents to explain why they wanted the lawn regularly mowed.
But when my dad suggested we could avoid basement flooding by digging a drainage ditch, I was keen. This wasn't a particularly easy job -- it involved going through a really annoying mix of clay and gravel and for one section digging while I was hunched over underneath our back deck. But I was eager to do it because I could imagine how my effort was actually helping my family.
Explaining why implies you're on their level, or close enough, which is poison to some people. If you are on their level, you could, conceivably, disagree with them, which would marginalize their authority over you. However, if you are forced to do things because of a "Because I Said So" mandate, well, you can't possibly disagree with an argument if an argument is not presented, hein?
The corrosive effect this has on the ability of the people in nominal charge to come up with arguments is never discussed, but becomes all too obvious when a social factor, such as a religion, loses a "Because I Said So" mandate it once had over society as a whole: The representatives of that religion, accustomed as they are to being able to dictate terms, are incapable of forming a cogent argument in favor of their position. They either rant and rave about how the world is ending, because, from their perspective, it is, or they come up with things which sound like arguments but which have holes in them a child could see through, and many children do.
Dictatorship weakens the dictators. So mote it be.
Actually that's kind of an interesting point. Don't know why you are getting down voted for bringing up an important dynamic about dictatorships in the nuclear family.
But is it the cause or is it the effect? Do some parents not know how to communicate positively and so they just shout the kids down (which still leads to a shouting match, just not a productive one) or do they start out with the ability more or less and then when they use the shouting down technique they find the short-term reward beneficial and it starts to become their go-to tactic to the point where they don't know how to not do it because it has become so automatic and to suddenly start going in the reverse direction would be seen as weak and they just can't have that?
It's kind of interesting watching Super Nanny when they have these extreme cases and she makes the parents change tack to more reasonable styles of communication and the kids improve dramatically and quite fast.
FWIW a mowed lawn discourages rodents from making homes next to your house, and eventually chewing through whatever they can find to make a hole into your house.
Of course people ruin this protection by then planting bushes right up next to their homes.
The idea is to create a sort of dead zone around your house where nothing really lives. Ants of course don't care and are a huge problem for homeowners.
Lawns consume water runoff as grass uses water to help with growth. Gravel pits outside your house less so. Paving means water runoff has nowhere to go so you need to build that into any paving plan or your basement will flood.
Paving is too ugly. Gravel pits are popular in areas that don't have enough rainfall to sustain grass. The big tradeoff with gravel pits is that they're not as nice for the kids to play on.
Playing devils advocate, debating everything, and winning every debate, only works if you're a patient, skillful debater. More often than not, debate is a war of emotional attrition. Better to choose your battles. For this reason, I avoid debate and negotiation if at all possible.
I had a huge series of fights when I was 13 with my mom/stepdad, as I told them I wasn't doing the chores as they didn't pay enough versus money I was making online. If you pay someone for chores it becomes less about their contribution to the family, and more something you pay someone for... which I think in hindsight was a huge mistake on their part.
Chores should be part of being in the family. Money should be tied to something else I think.
My family decoupled chores from money as you suggest.
The rationale is that chores are part of living in the household, and are not negotiable. My kid gets a paid allowance which is in principle tied to her “job” which is going to school.
It seemed inconsistent to say, “you are paid $x for this list of chores, which are in fact compulsory.” Because I didn’t want to allow her to opt out of, say, emptying the dishwasher because it wasn’t a good enough deal.
Fundamentally, I didn’t want to broker a market in chores.
There are other unrelated cases in which the introduction of money alters behavior because it turns an action/activity into a financial business transaction that's evaluated on that basis. One example I've heard cited a number of times is a daycare center that fined parents who were late to pick up their child. What happened was that some parents came to view the fine as just a late pickup convenience fee that they were happy to pay whenever it was easier for them. As a result, there were more late pickups because there was no longer a stigma attached to being late; you just paid the fee.
I agree with this; doing chores is fundamentally part of maintaining relationships, and therefore not exchangeable for money. If someone accepts and internalizes this lesson (paying for maintenance of a relationship), that's bad, and if they reject the lesson, it devalues the teacher of it.
Cash isn't the right currency to run a market where every activity must be done. The right currency to hand out is "suck points" for people who volunteer for chores. When a chore needs doing and nobody's volunteered, whoever has the least has to do it.
There are less harsh methods of convincing kids to do their part in the household. Taking their devices with screens from them or limiting their screen time/internet access works great in today's world!
Kids should always get basic necessities like a bed and food, but if they refuse to help the family in any way, there is no reason to not limit their access to luxury stuff, like electronic entertainment devices or sweets or whatever. Being able to do that is an enormous leverage in the hands of parents, and I really wonder why so many parents seem to hesitate to use it.
Entertainment, yes, but school requires a computer nowadays. Which means unless you stand there and look over their shoulder they're still getting their "entertainment".
School does not require 24/7 internet access, so even if they have their own computers on their desks, just shut down their internet access except for the express purpose of doing homework, for which you re-enable it for a limited time.
They might still have the machine then, but since today's kids have never gotten into "downloading digital stuff locally" but use streaming and online-only services for practically anything, the machine without internet access is nearly useless for entertainment purposes.
You of course need to know when they're doing their homework. Enable their device(s) for internet access in your home router during that time, disable it afterwards. You can surely hack together a nice solution to quickly block/unblock certain MAC addresses on the touch of a button with some IoT equipment and some Python scripts (like these Amazon ordering buttons which can be repurposed to control anything, or even a turnkey switch connected to an IoT sensor, which makes enabling/disabling internet access a cool and enjoyable process - I've personally planned to implement such a solution for quite a while now and researched parts and stuff, just haven't found the time to actually do it yet).
If your kid isn't enough of a hacker already that she/he uses MAC address modification to get around your limitation (most aren't, which is what I'll assume for now), this should do it - and you won't have to deal with the manual work of blocking and unblocking for too long, because I can guarantee you that they will bend to your will rather sooner than later. After all it's just some easy-to-do and quickly done household chores, it's not like you want to enslave them. And once you've followed through on your "no-internet-for-lazy-kids" policy once or twice and shown them that you are indeed able to take their toy from them, the threat of doing it alone will do wonders when the next chore comes up and they start inventing reasons again why they just can't do that nasty work right now.
The problem is when you tie them to money it implies you stop doing them and you don't get money. Whereas it should be you don't do them and you are not part of the family, and lose the right to your bed and stuff.
Sure, as a parent myself I understand what the problem is. I was just challenging the notion that that parents have any leverage in this negotiation anymore.
It is not a negotiation. We have tried to frame it as a question of ethical behavior. The kid wants to preserve the notion of a just household, and sees the logic of doing her part, provided the “ask” is equitable.
Edit: I can expound some. That's what would have been said to me if I responded in that way. Anyone living at home and not doing chores would pay rent. Mom and Dad did, so can anyone else bringing in money.
Growing up, chores were not tied to allowance. We got $5 a week for spending cash, any extra we earned was our own, but chores were just chores. It's how you helped out at home. If you didn't want to do chores, the response was "Here's the classifieds, find an apartment." Now, my parents wouldn't have kicked a 12 year old out for announcing they wouldn't do chores, but A) the realization of how much money one would need to survive on their own is a hell of a shocker, and B) there are much better ways to apply pressure to get someone back on board with being helpful.
Chores at my house were not laundry or cooking, they were things like putting dirty dishes up, putting them in, clearing the table, taking out the trash, stuff like that.
In my opinion adults are just kids without adult supervision. Bedtime. Diet. Reading vs television. Just kids with no one to keep them in line.
I think there is something to extrapolate from this article to work. I was recently given a retention bonus. Because I’ve been expressing a disappointment in the type of tasking I’m getting as compared to the job description I was hired for and the needs of the company. Rather than address that they’ve chosen to bump my “allowance”. Honestly it backfired.
Maybe you have already, since it sounds like you've communicated your feelings, but if you haven't yet I'd specifically talk about when you'll be able to work the job description they hired you for. Might be worth sticking it out in the short term. I've seen people leave just a little too early many times and it's a shame.
Agreed, I insisted we finally talk timelines about 0.75 years ago, or just call it a bad fit no hard feelings. Expectations were set that were not followed through with on the company’s side, and so we had an additional series of escalating conversations.
I have finally, about 2 months ago and 1.75 years after starting, been transitioned into tasking more in line with my hiring job description. However the technology our team manager has transitioned our team to during that time is a deal breaker for me.
He has almost completed removing all Python code from our code base / tech stack (from what I can tell, because he doesn’t want to learn Python this late in his career despite it being the lingua fanca of data teams), has taken over and basically killed the version control set-up me and another (now ex) team member set up, and has us using a GUI based ETL software that basically no one in my job market is using, CloverETL (now CloverDX).
With that as my recent experience it’s been difficult to find a new gig, so it’s back to nights and weekends refreshing my resume / skill set.
It was all a lesson in how to professionally draw a line as to what I will do for a company. Lesson learned.
There was a list of “jobs” with their going rate posted on the fridge.
My siblings and I could sign up for any job we wanted to make as much money as we “needed” that week.
Cooking dinner paid $10 with the added benefit of getting to pick the meal (it had to include a veggie).*
There were two evergreen jobs called “footrub” and ”shoulder/neck massage” that paid $1 per 15 minutes. Mom would tell you if you were doing a shit job at massage and you had to step it up to earn that dough.
Mowing the lawn originally paid $20 but my mom lowered the price when we got a riding mower because we thought it was “fun” and we were always arguing about who got to do it.
Footnotes:
* I made tacos, Kraft macaroni, and basic AF romaine salad EVERY WEEK.
My parents once tried a rate-chart system as well. However, completing everything on the chart (full of stuff I really had no desire to do) would max out around $5/week. Realistic earnings from this system were far less. I soon gave up, and simply focused on other non-chore-based ways to make money that were far more profitable for my time.
I think part of the problem with many chore/allowance systems is that its based on the parents' concept of money when they were kids, not adequately adjusted for inflation. So once the kids have some other way of earning money, the parents' system becomes a waste of time.
It can't be realistic earnings though, that's what parents make. It's the share of the share of their earnings spent on luxuries that they are willing to give to their children. 90%+ of kids' money goes to luxuries, after all.
Maybe I’m being naive or self-centered, but why should kids have to do chores? It’s not like they have any choice in their existence. Unless it’s an agreement made by both parties, you probably shouldn’t make your kids to chores. My parents offered me a contract when I was young to do chores in exchange for money but I always refused because I didn’t want/need the money and really didn’t want to do chores. And I turned out just fine (relatively I guess).
This problem comes up in contractarian ethics: our laws are justified by a social contract between individuals and the state, but none of us actually signed the contract execept (liberally interpreted) for immigrants. Why should we accept being bound by these laws? Similarly to how an individual has no choice of being born into a society, a child has no choice of being born into a family.
One common response to the problem in contractarian ethics is that we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.)
That might be an unsatisfying response (we wouldn't accept that kind of reasoning in tort law) but we're going to need to have some kind of response or else we'll just be left with anarchy and everyone will be worse off.
You can sheild your child from the fact that bring alive entails responsibilities outside yourself, but you'll inevitably be creating a leaky abstraction because reality just doesn't work that way.
Yes, the only way to "win" against this social contract forced upon you is to end it with you, and have no children.
I have a sneaking suspicion that this is why educated people in developed countries have far fewer children. On top of reproductive agency, a better educated populace sees the writing on the wall far more clearly regarding their own social contract than one who is more focused on survival. You cannot change the hierarchical nature of human civilization, you have no say in your social contract, you will always be forced to work to earn money on a planet you never wanted to be born on.
Also we live in a unique moment in history in regards to automation. While we may never live to see a truly autonomous society, our children will have a much larger chance. This is the social contract while the people at the top of society need something from us. (our labor) Do you really expect better treatment when we are (in their words) useless eaters?
This is the best we've ever been statistically and people still live in horrible conditions across the world (even here in the USA), I would highly encourage people to opt out if they can.
I think you can still understand that in the framework of a social contract. Sure you can go break the social contract, but if you choose to do so, we happen to have manhunters that attack and capture you (police). If you don't want to be part of the social contract, they can be unbound from it too.
I don't know why you're getting down votes, because yes, I did. But my point isn't that contractarian ethics is how we should make decisions, it's that it's what's driving the grandparent's moral intuition — they even refer to a contract — and that what they're pointing out is actually a classic problem with that sort of ethical reasoning.
> we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.)
However, if, say, I said, "I don't like the schools and I homeschool my kids, I think the military is 5x larger than it should be, I'm willing to pay for roads, I think drugs and prostitution should not be crimes and the police should be cut by 30%... and therefore my tax bill should be only x% of what it is", I don't actually have a choice in what "benefits" I "accept". (Suppose, for sake of argument, that I'd voted in every way I could for candidates who would change policies towards what I wanted, and it didn't work.) One response to that is "go live somewhere else", but (a) there may not be a somewhere else with a government that doesn't force people to pay for things I found objectionable, and (b) if I own my house and the land it's on, why should I have to move?
There are people who will demand that you pay for certain services, and back this demand up with the threat of force, which will ultimately be enforced if needed. There's a little bit you can do to try to influence how it turns out, but for the average citizen, it's next to nothing. Some people are perfectly happy with every aspect of this. Others are less happy, but see no point in complaining. A few do complain, and the results they get probably inform the previous group's perception.
I don't like the use of the word "responsibility" here. The term "responsibility" implies, to me at least, that you're doing something wrong if you don't live up to your responsibility. If you agreed voluntarily to a contract or an informal promise, failing to fulfill it does seem wrong. Disliking the terms of an alleged "social contract" that other people unilaterally impose upon you and choosing to disobey them is risky, but it is not wrong.
I guess there's one way in which it can be considered a contract. The true terms of the contract are, "Obey whatever rules we come up with (which change with every ballot measure and every legislature meeting) and we won't inflict our arbitrarily bad punishments upon you." But this would probably be considered under duress.
And it says: "[in the 1600s] more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that certain features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us."
My parents had 4 kids and didn't have much money. It simply would have been impossible without the kids helping. Chores weren't optional but sheer necessity.
Chores are a normal part of a functioning household, in the sense that if chores aren't done, or they are each done individually, then it isn't a household anymore. Each person could cook there own meal, and each person wash any dishes they want to use, but that wouldn't be very effective for anybody. Especially children, who can't do much for themselves.
My parents viewed chores as part of living in the household. I asked for an allowance once and my dad said the food that showed up in the pantry every week was my allowance.
My dad also used chores as a way to build discipline, and teach lessons. I remember washing the cars one time and doing a really crappy job. He made me completely wash them again. Do something right the first time.
Helping him with his side jobs like cutting firewood or picking oysters showed me what physically hard work looked like. It also showed me how to do things I don't want to do, but that need to get done. This came in handy while studying in college, and is a lesson that has helped whatever success I have ever had.
Chores are one way to teach kids how to be successful when they become adults.
> Maybe I’m being naive or self-centered, but why should kids have to do chores?
To learn the value of honest, dirty work. It is not about skill or intelligence, it is about sacrificing the one finite resource you cannot buy, for the sake of your community: time.
I don’t want to know the value of dirty work. If I had to milk the cows and do a bunch of work everyday that would directly cut into the time in which I was actually doing something valuable: programming.
Time is scarce and you need to be laser focused on how you spend it. Doing chores is a terrible time investment. You’re wasting your most valuable years.
Flip it around. Under what circumstances would you allow another person to freeload off of you for 18 years? Take up space in your house, eat your food, require you to drive them around, need money for their activities and fun time, use your TV, dirty up the house but not clean it, never cook a dinner or wash a dish, and in general have a good old time until they decide to move out.
"I didn't have a choice in being here" as a response to "Do your Chores" makes it sound like the parents went off into some land of nirvana and kidnapped a blissful native for the sole purpose of enslaving them to their will. Having children is how our species procreates. It's the only option if we want to continue as a species. Requiring that everyone living together pitch in and do a little bit of work to keep the household running smoothly is far, far from an onerous requirement.
We have a blended approach to chores and allowances. Some chores must be done, for no special compensation - laundry, dishes, and such things that are the basic level of a clean and sanitary home. Likewise, we have a base allowance they get no matter what. If they want more then the minimum money, they have to do more than the minimum chores.
Also, we don't need apps for this - I have a chore list on the wall, and a physical counter they can click for each chore. At the end of the week, I put their 'clicks' in a google spreadsheet, and it tracks what we owe them. Sometimes we'll pay out in cash, but just as often, that sheet acts like a bank account and they can get cash from us on-demand up to what we owe.
This reminds me of an experiment where they had a babysitting company fine parents for being late to pick up their kids. The reaction was that parents would be late more often, because they felt they'd "paid" the price. It's not quite the same but there is an overarching theme around the idea that once we think of something as a monetary transaction, we behave differently.
I’m struck at how often American culture needs scientific evidence to prove common sense, in this case: intrinsic rewards work better than extrinsic rewards.
What I’ve done with my kids, and my teams, is to point out (or lead them to point out themselves) how doing a chore made them feel: before and after. Chores feel painful before doing them. Completed chores — or more precisely the new state of the world post-chore — feels great.
Both children and adults have problems enduring short-term pain for delayed rewards. This isn’t a novel concept. What would be novel is an understanding of how to rewire a brain that still assumes we only need to think about the present moment and that the uncertain future will take care of itself.
Ironically, the best way to take action for the long-term seems to involve taking care of the present first. Once everything that needs to be done now is complete, and our lives and environment are stable and ordered, it seems that our restless minds have only one recourse: to work on tomorrow.
Growing up my stepdad would pay me allowance for chores. At one point I accumulated a lot of backowed money to the point where he just gave up and did not pay what he owed me. Frankly, I would have done the chores for free and it was not my idea, but the sole act of not paying what was owed made me resent him for a long time. Don’t make promises you can’t keep.
I got to eat; that was my allowance. I'm not even joking when I say dinner was not available until chores were done. And you still had to be present at the table for family dinner. It was incredibly motivating, but looking back, my parents managed to raise 5 kids and barely broke the poverty line for combined income. Chores weren't really that bad, I had to mow the lawn once a week and unload the dishwasher one day per week, plus assistanance on home maintenance.
Any money we made as kids came from jobs. I mowed a lot of lawns, helped a bunch of farmers, built fences, painted houses, fixed things until I could work at a restaurant at 16.
Instead of an allowance, seed a fund and teach your child to manage the money as it is theirs.
They will learn how to balance a check book. How to invest. How to work and save for what they want. If they squander the money, they learn the consequences of that in a safe environment.
A friend of mine's family did this with their kids, and they all became entrepreneurial.
Everyone had chores, and chores are what you did to help the family.
Put money into a checking account and have the child manage it. Any deposits from you need to be far enough apart to be a stretch for your child to manage. You want to get to quarterly or longer periods. Think of it like a bonus plan. They're part of the family and contributing in non-financial ways, so they get a share of the wealth.
This teaches valuable skills. I can't tell you how many people showed up at college with no idea of how to manage a bank account.
If they have money in their account, they can spend it on what they want, but they should be required to spend a portion of it on charitable things. Having money comes with responsibilities. If they run out, they need to figure something out.
Later, introduce the child to the concept of investing by showing how you can earn money in stocks, bonds, funds, etc.
Also, money they earn goes into the account. My friend bought a used car and fixed it up when he was 15 based on the money he earned from work he did for neighbors and investing in the stock market.
His dad was an engineer who flipped houses before it was fashionable. If the kids wanted a job, he always had one that paid.
Every time I see an allowance and chores related discussion pop up, I get the feeling that a lot of parents are unbelievably uncomfortable with the concept of discipline, consequences, and instilling responsibility. Like asking their kid to wash the dishes twice a week, and applying appropriate punishment until the chores are done is ruining some golden childhood or something.
Yep. Word to the wise: don't tie a reward to completing homework or earning good grades either. Demands for reward will increase over time and no homework will be done without "sufficient" reward, which always drifts upwards.
There’s much research on rewards and long term motivation. See Alfie Kohn’s Punished by Rewards and it’s 30+ pages of references including experiment descriptions.
Humans are not rats and birds, children are not pets to train, despite common parenting practices and school systems based on punishment and rewards.
Basically if you want a child to stop enjoying something, reward them for doing it (praise is also reward). Trains them to devalue the thing, to focus on the reward, and to stop doing the thing without a reward.
Similarly with punishment constant policing becomes necessary and the child stops being honest.
The human brain is designed to optimize for success.
I grew up in a farm where chores are a way of life. Our parents had a chalk board in the kitchen that listed out what each of us was supposed to do and a price next to it. We got paid a certain amount for each one. I think it's a great way to teach kids about life when they grow up.
> Children naturally want to help at a very early age
As a kid I didn't "want to help" at any age, let alone "naturally", and nevertheless I turned out to be a relatively well functioning adult when it comes to keeping my current house in order. What's with this mantra of "we need to make our children slaves in order to..."? I don't know what the ends are, to be honest. Feels quite alienating.
Anyway, I will be forever grateful to my parents for letting me spend my childhood playing and reading the books that I wanted instead of doing menial work.
Are you sure you know you didn't? I don't remember wanting to help either but with 3 toddlers of my own I realize there is an innate desire to participate in household tasks in every one of then. I should ask my mom.
I'm pretty sure, yeah. Granted, I come from a relatively less developed country where my parents were the first generation which had gone to university and they were also the first generation in my family tree who got to live in the city. As such, they had known first-hand what manual work really was, they saw and understood that it wasn't anything glamorous and as such I in turn understand why they didn't want to put me to work, too.
It's a long time since I did any psych but I seem to remember random rewards are effective in motivating people. For example, every few weeks give the kid a chance of a bonus allowance if all chores have been done.
Of course you don't tell the <strike>victim</strike> child this is random. Let their advanced, over eager pattern matching algorithms draw their own conclusions.
I use a form of it in my house, to good effect. Consistent positive behavior (with schoolwork, chores, etc) gets intermittently rewarded. Negative behavior resets any potential reward. But it's all implicit, with no attempt to threaten or coerce using rewards. The only exception being if they've already been told of a reward but significant negative behavior occurs before receiving the reward, in which case I explain why the reward was being rescinded. But there's no attempt to coerce them to stop the negative behavior by dangling the impending reward, because by the time I tell them that then it's a fact I hold firm to and not just an option/possibility.
It's just something I started doing without realizing it, and my daughter picked up on. When my girlfriend and her kids moved in, they didn't pick up on it as naturally as my daughter did. But at some point my daughter told them how I worked. And once she did, it became really effective for them too, and the attempts to barter with me when I'd ask them to do things like clearing the table slowly ended.
As someone who doesn't have kids, but still open to the remote possibility of having them, there's something I've been thinking about recently:
To memory, my parents didn't start having me do chores until I was at least 10 years old. I was not a fan of doing most of what was asked of me, and in retrospect I think the problem was the system I was working for was very unfair; I usually got paid $5 a week for mowing the lawn, but the other chores I had to do paid me nothing. I don't think my parents thought they were being unfair and I'm sure they were concerned with limiting how much money I would have on hand, as well as saving their own wallet obviously. What ended up happening was I had to wait too long to make another measly $5, and the other chores I had paid nothing so I felt I was getting gypped. At the time I didn't articulate this feeling to them... not sure why, but I guess that's just something children are usually unable to do.
I grew up as a lazy person; my grades were pitiful and I generally didn't try hard at anything until my early 20s when I realized that life was going to pass me by if I didn't do something about it. I don't think this is necessarily due to my parents raising me as a lazy person, but perhaps a more enterprising and less dependent attitude could have been instilled in me early on so I wouldn't have had to learn the hard way after I became an adult.
In response to that experience, I've been thinking about a better system for my hypothetical children:
- Get them doing chores as early as possible so that participating in work is normalized before the age they will have too many mindless distractions like video games. It's hard for me to say how much a 6 year old can do, but I'm sure there's at least a few easy tasks they could be doing on a regular basis.
- Most chores that are result of primarily my actions(e.g. I choose to own a stupid water-thirsty lawn) should pay. I would want to create at least a handful of opportunities for my child to make money throughout each week that they are motivated and regularly rewarded. Adults probably forget that a week seems like a long time to a child.
- Tasks like cleaning their room are unpaid because they have to learn to be responsible for their own mess. There will be a consequence for them not cleaning their room, but they can still choose to forego this task without being scolded(within reason of course).
- I will be their "bank" and they can deposit and withdraw from their account so long as I approve of what they are spending their money on. Each month, they will accrue a little bit of interest which, for the amount children will realistically make, is no big hit to my wallet. This not only allows me to make sure they aren't spending their money on crap, but it gets them used to the idea of working with a bank early on. In the case they decide to fail to clean their room, for example, I can choose to withhold access to their earnings.
- Besides holidays and special occasions, I won't be paying for the things that they want. If they want a toy, they're going to have to work for it and save enough money they they can afford it themselves. Their meals, educational material, and other essential items, are up to me, but they have to learn that they are ultimately responsible for their own desires or else they'd better develop a sense of patience.
I presume such a system would be difficult for families who live in places such as apartments where there are only so many chores to be done. Hopefully I live in such a situation, like having a house with property, where I can find enough things for my children to do.
Is the system I'm thinking of too draconian? What do you think?
I think most of it is fine except for the part where you hold the money (except for really young kids <7). I had a little box where I stored money as soon as kid. My dad gave me a $5 weekly allowance until I was like 10. I learned to manage my own money and not rely on him tracking it... this led developing my own accounting and budgeting practices.
Realistically letting the kids control their money gives them a bit extra feeling of independence without giving up much control... Most kids can't go anywhere without you being around until they're a teen and at that point it's a very different game. My dad always liked to ask me if my "money was burning a hole in my pocket" when he thought I was about to buy something stupid... He wouldn't stop me, but he did act like an advisor leaving the control and choice ultimately in my hands.
"so long as I approve of what they are spending their money on"
Is it their money or yours? You are welcome to not give them control over money, but they won't learn anything about controlling their spending.
"Each month, they will accrue a little bit of interest which, for the amount children will realistically make, is no big hit to my wallet."
This is also interesting. There's two aspects to saving: saving for big purchases, and saving for a rainy day. Interest is not really relevant to the first, and the latter is hopefully not part of childhood.
This is a good point, and I will clarify what I actually meant by the imprecise term "crap".
It's their money within the boundaries of my responsibility to them as the parent. For instance, I reserve my right to say no to violent video games, too much junk food, etc. They are free to make monetarily bad decisions, but I reserve the responsibility of instilling my values and preventing them from making really bad decisions like becoming overweight or obese. Sure, they can buy candy with their money, but if they are buying too much candy I can't let them continue to go down that path.
The idea of interest is merely to encourage saving. I don't know if that would really work.
> I reserve my right to say no to violent video games, too much junk food, etc.
this a great way to make them want both even more albeit without ever learning the restraint that comes from finding their own limits, probably as the result of one or more bad decisions. the biggest flaw i see in the planning of most prospective parents is that they fail to acknowledge their children will not be confined to their little garden of eden. the reality is that they'll have have friends with parents that exist outside your perfect moral codex (and some who are frankly just negligent) who will let them play all those games and drink as much soda as they want. i've never seen a parental media embargo actually have it's desired effect, but the kids who never learned to handle their shit where always immediately apparent. when you set such restrictions, all you're really doing is rejecting the responsibility to actually teach your children & hoping they figure it out on their own.
> the biggest flaw i see in the planning of most prospective parents is that they fail to acknowledge their children will not be confined to their little garden of eden
That doesn't mean I don't believe my kids are going out to experience(and develop their own) moral codes. What it means is that as long as they are in my house, they will abide by my rules, as they will have to when they will abide by their landlord's rules. This is coming from a former kid who went over to his friend's houses to play FPS games, downloaded porn then erased the internet history, and visited anarchy websites teaching me how to build bombs and the like. I know what children are liable to do outside my range of vision.
The problem I have with your perspective is that it can be taken to any end and doesn't teach children that different people have their own values, or that parents have a duty to their children's wellbeing. It takes moral relativism to such an extreme that, given the possibility that your premises are true, I'd have to question whether parents are even necessary.
The reason that I would instill my values in my children is so they can enter a world where not everyone sees my moral codex as valid, thus they are given something to think about when they come to an age where they're forced to wonder whether I as a parent am being reasonable. They can choose to rebel, which they almost certainly will, and they can also choose to respect at least some of my values. In my experience, the kids who grew up in households whose parents let their kids do whatever they wanted turned out to be dependent little shitheads. I know of only one exception, and in that case the dad was such a negligent jerk that the kid had to raise himself; he turned out pretty well in the end, but that's not without the psychological drama of having shitty parenting and other mistakes he made because he had no moral guidance.
Sorry, but I'd rather be an actual dad and play some role in how a child gets raised. Allowing children, especially under the age of 12, to do whatever they want, is absurd.
For many people, and kids, they’ll do something for free but not for small pay.
If you offer a few dollars it feels not worth it, but if you ask them to do it because it’s kind or the right thing to do they realize it’s another sort of worth.
When I grew up (in communist Poland in the 80ties), I was never paid for doing chores, and neither was any of my friends. I suggested this to my parents (I was a sly kid), but they refused it, citing that we're all a family and we should all be doing things for one another. I was getting a monthly allowance that I could spend however I wanted, but it was not linked to the chores. I think it's healtier attitude than paying children for their contributions to the family, as if the family were a business and they were employees.
American parents need to discipline their damn kids. Paying for chores? Completely nuts. Look how Asians raise their kids. That’s how Korea and Japan went from third world countries to rich ones in a couple of generations.
This article reminds me of the whole Japanese schoolkids being forced to keep their schools clean. Sure it works for some schools- the top elite ones where the kids may care about social censure. the remaining ones are typically filthy by most people's standards and in some cases encouraging bullies to shove the work onto the meek. humans in general aren't really going to care about "work" unless there is either punishment or reward involved.
studies have shown how punishment scars kids, i'd prefer creating the link in a kid's mind that work=money rather than sloth=pain
The distilled advice:
1. Expose kids to chores as much as possible.
2. Think small tasks, big contributions (The task can be tiny, but the key part is that it has to make a real contribution to the chore, not “mock work”)
3. Always aim to work together
4. Don't force it
5. Change your mindset about young children (Don’t assume toddlers and young children simply want to play; they may want to help)
https://www.npr.org/sections/goatsandsoda/2018/06/09/6169288...
HN discussion of the NPR piece: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17280710