“Chores help a child feel like they are a necessary part of the family.”
—AMISH MOTHER OF SEVEN
Many years ago, our middle son was taking karate lessons. He was eight years old. Karate was good exercise, helped him work off his energy, and he loved it. He even got pretty good at it. One day he was participating in a local competition. It was just a small event, but it was a big deal to him. He practiced and practiced. For several weeks, my life was filled with a little boy jumping, kicking, and leaping around the house while I did my work. I thought he was adorable and often told him how wonderfully he was doing.
The night of the competition, he did well, but so did another little boy. In fact, the two ended up in a tie. The instructor did an interesting thing to break that tie. He took the boys aside and asked each of them to tell him quickly what chores they did regularly around their home to help their family. The other boy rattled off several.
My son stood there, unable to think of one thing. Because of that, and only that deficiency, he was awarded second place.
There was a very good reason he couldn’t come up with any chores to tell the instructor about—he didn’t have any. I had found it easier to simply do things myself than to take the time to teach him.
I will never forget how angry he was while we drove home from that competition.
“Why don’t I have chores?” he demanded. “You should have been giving me chores. I felt stupid standing there not having one thing I could say that I did to help my family.”
He was right. We had failed in a major way. We had taken him to soccer games and baseball practice, Scouts and church, itty-bitty basketball practice and karate lessons, but we had not given him the dignity that would have come with being a part of contributing to our family’s needs.
After the noodle incident, I called Mary to ask her about how chores play a role in their family life. We started off with some chitchat, catching up. Mary had finished feeding all her farm animals and was ready for a nice visit. In the past, she and I have laughed about our mutual fascination with each other’s lifestyles. I tell her that she is living the alternate life that sometimes I wish I had . . . a large family of beautiful children, lots of wonderful relatives living nearby, kerosene lamps and horses and buggies and homemade bread cooling on the counter. It frequently looks idyllic.
On the other hand, Mary says she sometimes wonders what it would be like to spend all day every day writing books for a living. She enjoys writing poetry and has allowed me the honor of reading some of it. Because that is her image of the way I spend my days, I know she’ll be interested in hearing about my latest venture.
“I’ve decided to get a Jersey milk cow, Mary,” I tell her. “Just like yours.”
She laughs so hard that I’m afraid she’ll fall out the door of her phone shanty.
“Oh!” she says, and I can picture her wiping tears of laughter out of her eyes. “What a good joke you are telling me!”
“I’m not joking. I’m going to do it.”
“But, Serena, you are a writer, not a dairy farmer.”
“I’m only going to get one cow. I can learn.”
She starts giggling again.
“What?”
“Oh, nothing. It’s just that I can’t wait to see you trying to milk a cow in the middle of winter in the snow! John and I might have to hire a van just to come down and watch.”
Her laughter is infectious, and I’m certain my hoped-for Jersey cow will soon be a topic of discussion with her friends. There are times when I suspect that my main role in my Amish friends’ lives is as a source of entertainment and amusement to them. I have a suspicion that at get-togethers and work frolics they are saying the Pennsylvania Dutch equivalent of “You girls aren’t going to believe the question Serena asked me the other day.”
“I have to do this, Mary. My husband’s doctor says it would be a good idea for him to drink milk that has not been pasteurized.”
“This is that nutrition doctor you were telling me about?”
“Yes.”
She sobers. “And how is your husband doing?”
“His last blood test showed that his cancer numbers have gone up.”
Mary and I had met a few weeks before my husband collapsed while splitting firewood. Eleven months of excruciating pain and seven doctors later, he had been diagnosed with a rare and hard-to-diagnose form of multiple myeloma—bone cancer.
A bone marrow transplant had put him into remission, and he was relatively healthy and able to work again, but we were doing everything possible to keep the cancer from coming back. A doctor at the hospital where he had the transplant had developed a nutrition protocol to fight off his own late-stage cancer and had ended up helping thousands of other patients with it. My own research had turned up the health benefits of drinking pure raw milk, and the nutrition doctor, who is a part-time farmer, had confirmed it.
I had done some reading and discovered that there was no rhyme or reason to the various state laws regarding raw milk. Some allowed it to be freely sold and purchased in stores. Some allowed it only if it was purchased at the actual farm. Some allowed it only if one bought into a “herd share” program—which means buying milk from a cow that you technically own, but that a farmer feeds and milks for you. The herd-share program was the only thing allowed in Ohio, but there were legalities within legalities about that to the point that some small-time Ohio farmers had been arrested in sting operations that uncovered their illegal sales of raw milk.
My sisters and I had been raised on raw milk from our family cow and I had read that there are healing enzymes in it that are missing from pasteurized milk. I also had a friend with a science background who attributed at least part of her recovery from leukemia to its beneficial effects. I therefore had little patience with Ohio’s laws, especially since the selling of raw milk was completely legal just one state over, in Pennsylvania. This is why I was exploring the option of buying my own milk cow.
“Oh, I am so sorry.” All traces of laughter in her voice have disappeared. A husband’s health is a serious matter. She begins giving me seasoned, professional advice about choosing and keeping a cow.
“If my seven-year-old can milk a cow,” she encourages me, “then you can milk a cow.”
It may have been my imagination, but I thought I heard an element of doubt in her voice.
“Wait, your seven-year-old milks cows?” I ask. Wasn’t that terribly young to be given such a potentially dangerous task? What if the cow kicked? Most seven-year-olds I know couldn’t be trusted to reliably feed the dog, let alone deal with a large animal.
“Of course,” she says. “How else will she learn?”
The Amish, she reminded me, start teaching a child to help with small chores when they are two years old. Why? Not because a two-year-old can actually be any real help but because that child, in the Amish way of thinking, needs to start feeling like a necessary, contributing part of the family. Mary can rattle off a list of tasks that are appropriate for each year of a child’s life.
A few days later, I received a handwritten note from her in the mail. She had thoughtfully given me a list of chores and the ages at which she and other Amish mothers had their children performing them. I found the list enlightening, charming, and very Amish. It was written exactly as follows:
Chores for children:
Feed and water hens, gather eggs (if no silly rooster is in the flock)—Age 4
Carry wood for heat stove—Age 6
Carry out ashes—Age 10
Milk a cow—Age 7 to 12 (depends on muscle strength)
Feed horses—Age 6
Bed horses—Age 10
Mow lawn—Ages 6 to 12
Wash main dishes—Age 4
Wash pots and pans—Age 10
Sweep kitchen floor—Age 5
Set table—Age 4
Do laundry—Age 11
Rock baby—Age 5
Bake a cake—Age 8
Bake cookies—Age 7 (if oven mitts are worn)
Fetch mail—Age 5
Harness a pony—Age 7
Harness a horse—Age 12
I remembered Susan sitting in a child-size rocking chair when she was only five as she held an Englisch baby her elder sister was caring for. The baby had seemed a little large for such a small girl to handle, but Susan had taken the job quite seriously.
At first all of these ages seem to me a bit young for the size of the chore. I’ve been in Mary’s basement. She does laundry on an old-fashioned wringer washer fueled by a gasoline engine, an appliance that even most adult women wouldn’t know how to use these days. An eleven-year-old seems awfully young to be taking on such a large job.
But then I remember how vigilant Mary is with all her children. None of these chores would be done without supervision until the child was proficient, but the training would begin, and the chore would eventually be done well and become yet another skill a child could count themselves as possessing.