The Mistake Parents Make With Chores

The Atlantic

6 days ago

Each September at the Montessori school I run, the preschoolers engage in an elaborate after-lunch cleanup routine. They bustle through the room with sweepers and tiny dustpans, spreading crumbs all over the floor and making a bigger mess than they started with. If any scraps do make it into their dustpans, most of them spill out as the children exuberantly walk to the trash bin.
It would be faster and neater to simply let the teachers do all the tidying up. But our goal is more than achieving a spotless classroom; it's also helping children develop motor skills, responsibility, confidence, and the ability to clean effectively on their own. Sure enough, by December, the children's sweeping efforts become more refined. By springtime, if not earlier, they start to pick up other messes throughout the day without a teacher's prompting. They haven't just learned to mop and scrub; they've taken ownership over their environment.
Contrast this with my own house—where, in a half-hearted effort to encourage my children to take responsibility for our home, I've been known to say, 'You live here!' as they ignore the pile of dishes in the sink. After years in Montessori classrooms, I assumed that a culture of taking responsibility would develop spontaneously in my family. And it might have, had I not made some early mistakes. When my oldest daughter, as a toddler, stirred pancake batter out of a bowl, I wrested the spoon from her hand. When my son made an earnest effort to fold a pair of pants by himself, I immediately refolded them more neatly. After those moments, and countless other small ones like them, my kids' enthusiasm to help started to dwindle. As the researchers I spoke with told me, this pattern is common among parents who, in an effort to make chores more efficient, unwittingly thwart their child's desire to help.
Granted, most kids, mine included, do some housework, and plenty of kids do lots. But research indicates that parents shoulder much of the burden. A small 2009 study of dual-income, middle-class families in Los Angeles showed that chores accounted for less than 3 percent of household activities for the children, who were between the ages of 5 and 17, compared with 27 percent for their moms and 15 percent for their dads. Lucia Alcalá, a psychology professor at California State University at Fullerton who studies sociocultural and cognitive development, pointed out that lots of parents these days use chores to refer to tasks that solely benefit the child, such as cleaning their own room, rather than to duties that serve the whole family. The half a dozen researchers I spoke with said that many children do little when it comes to vacuuming the living room or taking out the trash. 'We give our kids a free pass,' David F. Lancy, the author and editor of multiple books, including The Anthropology of Childhood, told me. Many parents, he said, 'don't hold our kids accountable for self-maintenance or contributing.'
The free pass Lancy refers to may hold back children, who stand to learn much from chores. These complex, multistep activities require sustained focus, planning, problem-solving, and a commitment to working toward a goal—all valuable skills for anyone to develop. Put together, these skills may lead to strong executive function. For young children, chores can also be intrinsically rewarding. When a kid folds a pile of laundry, they've created order out of chaos. Seeing their success, children can start to develop a sense of self-competence and self-efficacy —the belief that they'll succeed at a given task—which may boost their confidence. On a physical level, household tasks can lead to stronger fine-motor skills, which are essential for, say, zipping a jacket and handwriting, and which teachers report have been declining over the past several years. To help with these deficits, some parents seek occupational therapy for their children. But for many kids, at-home practice will suffice. A National Geographic article from earlier this year recommends activities such as squeezing sponges and pouring cups of water to improve grip and coordination. But helping with the dishes could naturally have kids wringing out sponges and emptying glasses into the sink, no special setup required.
Not only is incorporating skill-building into necessary tasks easier on parents; it can also help children feel like they belong, researchers told me. Chores are 'social glue,' Lancy said. They integrate a child into the family and give them a purpose —and kids are eager to be involved. Studies have found that young children have a willingness to pitch in and support others. Angeline Lillard, a professor and the director of the Early Development Laboratory at the University of Virginia, told me that in one study she helped run, when children were given the choice between pretending to do a task, such as washing dishes or baking cookies, or doing one for real, most children opted to do it for real. When asked about their choice, the children said that they had opted for the real task because they wanted to contribute. According to Suzanne Gaskins, a cultural-developmental psychologist who has spent nearly 50 years studying children and their families, the motivation to engage in chores is simple: 'Children want to go where the action is.' And there's a lot more action in a real kitchen than in a pretend one.
Many parents might insist that their kids don't want to help out—and they may have a point. Typically, very young children are the ones who are most excited to mimic their parents and lend a hand with laundry. But a toddler's contributions are often clumsy and, like the efforts of my Montessori preschoolers in September, may actually result in more work for the adult—so the adult shoos the child away. After enough times hearing 'Go play,' the child will get the message, Michaeleen Doucleff, the author of Hunt, Gather, Parent, told me. Other parents may turn a simple chore into an involved lesson, with lots of talking and micromanaging, rather than allow the child to participate on their own. As Doucleff explained, this dynamic turns the child off as well.
Much more effective is finding a middle ground between the two extremes. What this looks like will vary based on the kid. 'A child could peel one carrot or even just watch,' Doucleff said. This approach might demand some patience and flexibility from parents at first. Children aren't going to be instantly capable at something they haven't had the opportunity to practice. But getting kids in the habit of helping early is much easier than convincing an older child who has never done chores to give them a try. For parents with resistant kids, their best hope is to avoid bribes, allowance, other incentives, and chore charts, and instead turn chores into a social activity. Saying 'Let's do this together' can make a task more engaging, Barbara Rogoff, a distinguished professor of psychology at UC Santa Cruz, told me. And, if that fails, parents may have to simply enforce their expectations, Cara Goodwin, a child psychologist, said. Although kids may not like being held accountable at first, many will eventually gain satisfaction from a job well done.
None of this is as easy as it seems. I believe wholeheartedly in teaching children practical life skills, yet I still inadvertently turned my oldest two children off chores by micromanaging my first and shooing away my second. Guiding my students to tidy up came naturally. But once I had children of my own, I learned how a 3-year-old earnestly asking, 'Can I help?' could sound like nails on a chalkboard. I'll admit that when I was exhausted, short-fused, and desperate to get dinner on the table, my children's budding self-efficacy wasn't front of mind.
I have four kids now. Over the past few years, welcoming all of their help has become easier, partly because I realized that I could spend more time with them if I included them in my routines. As my littlest ones tagged along with me, unloading the dishwasher, pulling clothes out of the dryer, and even mixing pancake batter, my older ones started asking to join in. Perhaps they wanted to be where the action was. Or maybe they wanted, as Gaskins suggested, 'to give back to the people they love'—a common motivation for kids. When Gaskins told me this, her theory sounded a little idealistic. But when I asked my kids why they do housework, they all said it was because they wanted to help me. Turns out they were eager to pitch in all along. They were just waiting for me to let them.