nannies, housekeepers, cleaners, teachers, gardeners, drivers, cooks, coaches, tutors and more.
Families caught up in activity-mania have scant time to work together at home or to value such time. Childhood chores and a family-centered life have fallen to the wayside, replaced with a frenetic lifestyle centered on two careers, affluenza and competitive activity-mania.
Chores are a powerful tool to develop resilient and responsible young people from age 2 to 22. Chores provide children with built-in autonomy. When adolescents have to choose between healthy and dangerous behaviors, they rely on a strong sense of self that is established during the first dozen years.
Childhood chores install the rudder and self-discipline to say “no” to peers who propose dangerous behavior.
Most children will never ask for chores, so it’s up to parents to institute a chore system, which has deep roots in our culture. Adding chores to your family routine is not intended to add stress to the over-stressed modern family. A chore routine is intended to reduce stress by sharing the workload and prioritizing what’s important to a family.
Slowing down enough to sweep a floor, make a salad for dinner or mow the lawn is good for the heart and soul of self and family.
Beware if you view chores as just “one more thing” to insure your children have the best competitive advantages in life. Simple acts of labor related to our daily survival have meaning beyond the surface.
Millennials are growing up in an environment where they are removed from performing essential daily life tasks, and from the earth that provides food and our home. Slowing down and working as a family is a long-term investment in your family.
The lost tradition of childhood chores
As recently as a century ago, children were essential to the dominant family business of the era: farming. Most school calendars still reflect the obsolete need to free the youngsters to assist with food production in summer.
The exodus from the farm lifestyle has dramatically changed what we expect from them.
In only a century, children shifted from being an economic asset to an economic liability. They are no longer active contributors to the family well-being. They have morphed into being mini-consumers and performers. Parents and paid caregivers wait on them. Divorced parents vie for their attention and time.
People have fewer children in the new millennium, and ask less from them. Out of necessity, larger families and single parent families are more likely to have chore systems, according to my survey.
Families orchestrate weekends so children can perform in adult-controlled competitions of youth sports, dance, beauty contests, creativity competitions, scouting, 4-H, pets, music and more. Instead of a childhood full of play and exploration, with some chores, children are routed towards being mini-adults with the goal to make their parents proud.
Children have also gained rights, freedom, and an unprecedented voice within the family, with correspondingly few responsibilities. They consume more and produce less.
In the competition to have winning performers, “helicopter parents” hover over their children’s every homework assignment, soccer practice, and music lesson. Helicopter parents advocate for their children with teachers and coaches to insure the child is insulated from failure, which theoretically damages self-esteem.
Ironically, trial and error is often the best teacher. We often learn more from hard-earned failure than from easy success. Many children and teens live up to their entitlement with little awareness or apology in today’s world where everyone gets a trophy.
A system for chores benefits everyone
Children with attention deficit disorder can benefit from chores and responsibility because it prepares them to develop coping skills. For example, Jamal has ADHD so his mother never expects him to remember to feed his bird or clean the cage, chores she has taken on. “I always have to remember his diagnosis,” mom said, quoting Jamal’s pediatrician. Remembering the diagnosis is different than setting low expectations. Jamal’s mother is doing him no favors by being his servant. Jamal has no problem managing his time to play endless hours of video games and ignore his bird. Jamal and his mom need to figure out a system to remind him to care for his pet, or give the bird away.
Children with chores feel they belong to a group and that the group depends on them. This connection to family is the fundamental belief of Adlerian psychology. Show me a child with a job around the house and I’ll show you someone with greater odds to become a responsible teenager, and an independent adult able manage his or her life.
They have been raised with the mistaken beliefs they can do no wrong, that everything they do is wonderful, and their demands often run the family. Without the opportunity to learn from mistakes, children never develop resilience and the courage to try again, try harder, or try a different approach. They want everything with a click of a mouse or faster than sending a text message.
Instead of developing character through chores, children ask for – and get – another handout from mom and dad, and spend their days suspended in sugared-screen time, consuming sugar and high-fructose corn syrup in front of a variety of screens: TV, computer, video games, iPods, Blackberries, cell phones and more.
Both parents often scramble in an outside career to support their children’s ceaseless want list. They feel guilty over the litany of what their children don’t have, and compensate by giving into their children’s demands.
Parents have only one brief shot at raising children before their childhood is sealed in the hard drive of memory. By age 11, their belief system is entrenched and they become more difficult to influence. The less time parents spend with their children, the more difficult it is to influence them. When we give more things and money and ask less from children, it adds up to entitlement. We’ve become their servants. They’ve become performers and consumers.
Count on me
There is an alternative. Children can be re-introduced to the age-old idea of contributing to the family welfare, without pay, on a regular basis. If you employ the tactics suggested in this book, it may cause children, tweens and teens to cry out in protest, “I am not your servant!”
Indeed, they are not our servant, and we are not their servant. We are a family, a team that can work together using simple practices of family meetings and dinners, encouragement, and natural and logical consequences to develop responsible children who will leave home, and be self-supporting through gainful employment.
Doing chores develops responsibility in children at school and eventually in the workplace. It teaches a multitude of skills and builds genuine self-esteem -- not the self-excess-teem children have drowned in during the past few decades. Children can be told “no,” that what they did is not up to par and they need to try again. They need reasonable boundaries and guidance from parents, the family’s benevolent team leaders.
Many people who contributed stories to this book grew up on farms where they were counted on to contribute to the family’s welfare from as young as age 2. The experience of being a valued team member with responsibility left a lifelong impression on them. Many of them are successful entrepreneurs and company leaders.
Your children do not have rise at dawn to milk cows in a cold barn or spend the summer picking vegetables to feel like people depend on them. A few simple jobs a week will establish
