Back in the day, if someone had given me a dollar every time I heard a child tell one of my kids, “I can’t play today, I have to do my chores,” I would have been able to hire a cleaning service.
Of course, these little friends with all the chores could have been making up excuses to avoid playing with my kids (I was the mom who never let anyone inside the house after all), but I don’t think that was the case.
I think their parents actually made them do chores.
My kids are in their twenties. When they were younger, I burned brain cells coming up with ways to compel my children to want to help out consistently around the house – that is to say, to do chores. The key word here is want. I wanted my children to want to help us keep our home relatively clean. Without being asked.
My mother was a yeller. Every Saturday morning, she went ballistic shouting out directives to the six of us kids: Clean your room! Run the sweeper! Scrub the toilet!
Some of us scrambled to do the things, some of us hid in our rooms and tried to act like we were still asleep, and some of us scurried outside to help with the yard work (it’s me, I scurried!). We never had regular assigned duties. The only thing regular for me was the fact that I got out of doing anything water-related because I had really bad eczema on my hands. This is probably why I was able to escape the wrath of my mother in the house and help my dad in the yard. The baby always gets her way, right?
I don’t think my parents ever said this out loud, but I had the distinct impression that they had so many kids so we could do all the things around the house. This seems absurd to me now, but back then? Not so much.
Also back then, kids seemed to do things around the house (chores) because it was more broadly expected of them. And no one I knew got paid for it either. It was just part of the family operation. Saturday mornings were for cartoons and taking orders from our parents. And the first one didn’t happen if you weren’t wholly prepared for the second.
When my kids were younger, our Saturdays were for soccer, basketball, birthday parties, playing outside, reading, and crafting. Sundays were for church, making family breakfast, and getting ready for the week ahead. During the school year especially, the weekends were a time to relax and recharge for all of us. I considered going to school and learning as my kids’ first and most important jobs. And they took those jobs seriously. When they were playing together outside, or reading, or practicing piano, I wasn’t going to shut that down for chores.
About this time every year when summer break was on the horizon, it began to bother me that my kids would be around the house a lot – not unloading the dishwasher, not folding and putting away laundry, not cleaning bathrooms, not helping me do all the basic things I had been doing on the fly throughout the year.
One of my earliest attempts to get the kids to pitch in on some sort of regular basis during the summer was the chore chart. I made a colorful poster with little pockets which held slips of paper listing tasks that needed to be done every day (unloading the dishwasher), every other day (sweeping under the kitchen table), or once a week (cleaning a bathroom).The idea was that the women-children would move each slip of paper/task to the completed column as they finished it. Even when they were young, my kids were competitive. I truly had this vision of my children out-choring each other in a cleaning frenzy – emptying waste cans, vacuuming, doing load after load of laundry – to see who could move more slips of paper to the completed column.
I tried a few other things over the years, like having the girls draw straws to figure out who would do the most dreaded chore (I can’t remember what that was exactly). Another summer, I paid the youngest $5 a week to unload the dishwasher every day. That one seemed to work, although I hid it from her two older sisters because we didn’t do allowance and I felt guilty. One summer, I declared that each of the girls would shop for, cook, and clean up after one meal a week. I was delighted that they seemed to be learning how to do something I was never all that excited about. I deemed that experiment a success. It was during that summer that the window closed for good on the idea of the women-children doing regular chores.
The chore situation had become a mom fail that I carried around for years, and I let it get heavier every summer. In the end, I came to realize that I was more disappointed in myself than I was in my kids. As the kids grew older and we all continued to exist in our state of happy and loving semi-messiness, I learned to appreciate how truly blessed I am.
And one day, who knows, I might have grandkids who complain about their parents who make them do chores.
