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CHORES: MORE FUN IF SOMEONE ELSE DOES THEM, AND YOUR CHILD SHOULD

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Children should do chores. That’s a controversial premise, although not everyone will admit it. A few parents will declare outright that their children are “too busy for chores” or that “their job is school.” Many, many more of us assign chores, or believe in them, but the chores just don’t get done.

If this is true in your house, it’s a big part of the reason you’re not getting as much joy as you could be out of your family life. There aren’t that many issues upon which I’ll plant the parenting expert flag, but I’m a firm believer in chores. If you’re clearing your eleven-year-old’s dishes after every meal, then unless your child has physical or mental special needs that require this service, you are doing it wrong—as are most of our fellow parents. In a survey of 1,001 US adults, 82 percent reported having had regular chores growing up, but only 28 percent said that they require their own children to do them.

Our children are capable of helping us look after our homes and do the work it takes to keep everything clean, pleasant, and running smoothly, and in some families, they do. In pediatrician Deborah Gilboa’s family, children take on a big responsibility every year, depending on age, and keep that chore until the next child is ready to step up. At seven, they become responsible for the family laundry. At nine, they become the lunch maker for the family; at eleven, they become the designated dishwasher emptier; and at thirteen, they become responsible for making dinner once a week. Because her kids do those things, Dr. Gilboa and her partner are freed up to do, as she puts it, “the things the kids can’t. They can’t pay the bills. They can’t mediate sibling disputes. The only way we have the time and energy to do those things is if we delegate some of the rest.” Jennifer Flanders, a mother of twelve children (the oldest is twenty-nine; the youngest, seven), says something similar. “It quickly became clear that they could make messes much faster than I could clean them up.” For her children, the expectation that they will do chores is a given, and by the time they’re in college, each child is capable of the cleaning, cooking, lawn mowing, and general tending it takes to make a household work. For more on how that works, keep reading.

What Goes Wrong

Chores themselves mostly aren’t fun (although they can be). But when children don’t help out with household tasks, their absence, and our resentment, gets in the way of families having fun together and detracts from our children’s sense of being part of a larger whole. Children who don’t do chores also miss out on the chance to make their own fun that much sweeter by adding in the satisfaction that comes from having had a job to do and seeing it through. When we don’t give our children age-appropriate responsibilities (and expect them to fulfill them), we’re not respecting who they are now or the adults they will later become, and we’re leaving them with a sense of being adrift in a world where everyone wants to feel needed.

We can blame culture, a little bit. If your child is coming home with five hours of homework every night and is in even one sport, that doesn’t leave much time for anything else. If every other child in the community plays three sports a year on top of Kumon and robotics club, you can get sucked into a schedule that makes chores hard to establish without even realizing you’ve been had. And although you should put absolutely no faith at all whatsoever in your child’s declaration that “no one else has to do the dishes,” he may be right—and being part of a community where most kids aren’t expected to contribute around the house does rub off.

That works the other way around, too. If you’re surrounded by families who respond to your invitations for their child to join yours for a day of sledding with “as soon as he’s done with his chores,” and if your child is seeing friends being told to “clean up your room” and helping with the dinner dishes, your job will be (a little) easier, and when you’re the family that expects children to do their share, you help spread that expectation.

The sheer effort of getting the children to do the chores is also a big factor in why it just doesn’t happen. Studies show that it takes, on average, five years of nightly nagging before a child will, without a reminder, clear her own plate from the dinner table. The fact that those studies were entirely unscientific and done in my kitchen on a sample set of four should not make you believe in them any less. The struggle is real. It’s easier to do it yourself until, suddenly, it’s not—but if you wait until then to start nagging, you have a rough five years ahead. If you can pay someone to clean your house for you (we do), the load on the parents is lighter, making it even more tempting to skip the nagging and just do it yourself.

That’s the choice many of us make. Of parents who said they had chores themselves but didn’t expect their kids to do them, 75 percent said they believed regular chores made kids “more responsible” and 63 percent said chores teach kids “important life lessons.” We believe in chores. We talk a good game. But when we look honestly at who’s doing what in our kitchens, laundry rooms, and bathrooms, many of us (including me) struggle to do what it takes to get kids to help at home.

Research not performed in my kitchen also backs up our instinct that we’re not asking enough of our children. Between 2001 and 2005 a team of researchers from UCLA’s Center on the Everyday Lives of Families (CELF) recorded 1,540 hours of footage of thirty-two middle-class, dual-earner families with at least two children, all of them going about their regular business in their Los Angeles homes. They found that the Los Angeles parents did most of the housework and intervened quickly when the kids had trouble completing a task. Children in twenty-two families made it a practice to ignore or resist their parents’ requests for help. In eight families, the parents didn’t actually ask the children to do much of anything. (This research was described by one of the younger social scientists as “the very best birth control ever.”)

Unfortunately, if you wish your children did more around the house (as I do), the brutal truth is that it’s on us if they don’t. Children whose families have established an expectation that they will contribute to the workings of the household, do—whether it’s a five-year-old in Peru’s Amazon region climbing trees to harvest papayas and “helping haul logs thicker than her leg to stoke a fire” or a seven-year-old doing the household laundry every weekend. They may not whistle while they work; they may require near-constant reminders; they will almost certainly not do the job to your standards without years of training, but children (including mine and yours) can and will do the work if you require it of them.

There are two ways to make this happen. The first is to make it a priority—to say what you mean and mean what you say around chores, to enforce consequences, to nag, to ground, to request and request and request and never let up—or just do it yourself or conclude that you can live with unmade beds or un-put-away laundry.

This first course takes serious dedication. You’re swimming against the tide—most parents, as I’ve said, don’t pull this off (and as you’ll see as you read further, I’m still working on it). I suspect it’s worth it, and the parents I’ve talked to whose children (after years of training) genuinely do regular chores with efficiency, if not grace, assure me that it is so.

The second way to get your children to do chores is to need the help—and this is why middle- and upper-class families with two healthy parents are at a rare disadvantage, and one few would want to change. If you can’t manage without help because one parent is chronically ill, because you’re a single parent, or because you’re working two jobs just to keep the basics covered, your children are more likely to step up. They will learn to prepare food, produce clean laundry, and take care of younger children. This can be a bad thing (see Jeannette Walls’s memoir, The Glass Castle), or it can be a good thing (think Mary and Laura in Little House on the Prairie). It can also be a bad thing that leads to good things.

You can’t, and wouldn’t want to, artificially create a situation in which your life demanded that your three-year-old boil her own hot dogs, as Jeannette Walls describes (she was badly burned as a result). But watch. There will come a time when you are faced with an injured family member or animal, or your car goes off the driveway into a snowdrift, or you are traveling alone with four young children and one toddler is barfing and the baby is crying and the preschooler needs to go poop. At that moment, you will look at whatever child is even close to physically capable of whatever you need and you will say, “I cannot do this without you.” And that child will perform miracles.

You can be very, very glad that you’re not in that place very often—but recognize that the capable child who comes through in a pinch is the same child sitting at the dinner table reading a comic book while you clear and wash the dishes generated by the meal you cooked half an hour ago. He is not physically different from the children born to less who do more, or the kids from that big family down the street who are always so polite and helpful when they come over.

All of which means that, as much as we don’t want to, we really need to nudge that child up and teach him to properly load the dishwasher—which also means we must find a way to get over our own distaste for the task. In my research, I asked 1,050 parents an open-ended question: what do you least like about parenting? The most popular answer, without contest, was “discipline” in various forms, and that included enforcing chores and other responsibilities. Among the things we don’t like? “Enforcing the rules, especially about household chores,” the challenges of “chores and disciplining a child,” and having to nag kids to do simple chores. Many parents wish they had begun enforcing the rules and started a routine of chores earlier when their kids were younger instead of “fighting teeth and nails to get something done” when they are older. We may think our children should do chores, but we really don’t want to have to make them—but it’s worth noting that we don’t like “doing all the chores myself” either.

We will all, parents and children alike, be happier if we parents overcome our reluctance to be the chore enforcer. “It’s not good for kids to be outside playing and Mom to be inside doing all the work,” said Jennifer Flanders. “They benefit more from helping and from working side by side with us, and then we can all play together.” Children who help more at home feel a larger sense of obligation and connectedness to their parents, and that connection helps them connect to others and weather life’s more stressful moments—in other words, it helps them be happier. Their help, even when it’s less than gracious, helps us be happier, too. We know we shouldn’t shoulder all the work of the household alone, and we know, too, that children raised to get up and help when there is work to be done become a more productive part of any group they join.

“We want to raise our children with joy,” said Flanders, and that means building a family that works together to sustain and support one another. “I don’t want to be a martyr, always complaining about all the work the kids create. Why would you raise kids you’re not happy to live with?”

When Should Chores Start for Kids?

The short answer to that question is now. Although it’s never too late to start, the younger kids are when we create an expectation that they’ll help around the house, the better. If you’re doing work that’s necessary to the running of the house and your children are sitting and watching (or more likely, sitting nearby and watching something else), get them up and get them involved.

Wondering what kids can do? Probably more than you think. Look back in time a little, or even just to your own childhood, and ask yourself—when did kids start milking cows and churning butter? Mowing the lawn? Washing the dishes? Usually, the answer is something like “As soon as they could do so safely,” an assessment parents once made by working alongside their kids until they felt the kids were ready to take over, allowing the parent to move on to other work.

“What chores should children do at what ages?” is a common question, and there are plenty of answers (just search “age-appropriate chores” online). But before you do a Web search for a chore list, ask yourself a more localized question. What are you doing when you do the things that make your house run? Are you vacuuming and sweeping? Gathering or folding laundry? Feeding chickens? The question isn’t really what kids can do, it’s what needs to be done at your house. The jobs that absolutely need to be done for your family are the jobs you want to be teaching and eventually delegating, whether they’re as generic as washing dishes or as specific as piloting the houseboat through the lock. This is not about, as one popular chore chart suggested, training a four-year-old to sanitize doorknobs—unless, of course, sanitizing doorknobs takes up a lot of your time. It’s about learning to work together to all make the house run, so that you can all enjoy everything else life has to offer.

But What About All That Homework?

Here’s the most common question, or maybe excuse, brought up by parents of older kids who aren’t doing nearly what they could to help the house run smoothly: how can we ask the high schooler who barely got to dinner after sports practice to put in fifteen minutes of kitchen time before setting off for his three hours of homework, especially if, as discussed in Chapter 1, we’re trying to put a family priority on getting enough sleep?

We can—once we understand that this is truly important. Who do you want this child of yours to grow up to be? Almost all parents respond to surveys and questionnaires by saying they are deeply invested in raising caring, ethical children, and most parents tell researchers that they see these moral qualities as more important than achievement. Other research suggests that many of our children aren’t getting that message. In a survey of more than ten thousand students from thirty-three schools in various regions of this country, Harvard psychologist Richard Weissbourd found that almost 80 percent valued achievement of their own happiness over caring for others—and what’s more, most thought their parents agreed.

Although household chores are a small thing, the subtle but pervasive message of requiring them isn’t small at all. Requiring that high schooler to contribute to the family well-being and the smooth running of the household before turning his attention to his books conveys the value you place on that contribution. Schoolwork is important, but so is your place in this family community. You’re not saying “you must do dishes instead of homework” (although it’s likely your high schooler will claim to see it that way). You’re saying “you must find a way to balance these competing responsibilities that does not shirk your role as part of this family.”

It’s so, so tempting to give the kid a pass, and so hard to see how often we hand over that get-out-of-chores-free card. But what you want now isn’t always what you want later. “Our interviews and observations over the last several years also suggest that the power and frequency of parents’ messages about achievement and happiness often drown out their messages about concern for others,” says Dr. Weissbourd. Your “message” about helping to care for one’s family needs to be repeated often, especially if it involves doing the dishes.

But what if that fifteen minutes a night leads to a B in Spanish, which is ultimately the reason the Harvard admissions office—home of the noted researcher Richard Weissbourd, quoted earlier—puts your snowflake in the “no” drift?

You can’t look at it that way. (Note that if I didn’t sometimes lean toward looking at it that way myself, it probably wouldn’t occur to me.) You do not just want to raise the child you can hothouse and coddle into the Ivy League. You want to raise the adult who can balance a caring role in the family and community with whatever lifetime achievement goals he chooses. Teaching that balance has value. Asking—and expecting—children to contribute is important. One small longitudinal study, done over a period of twenty-five years, found that the best predictor for young adults’ success in their midtwenties was whether they participated in household tasks at age three or four. That researcher, Marty Rossmann, used data from a long-term study that her own family had participated in, which included questions about children’s participation in family work at ages three to four, nine to ten, and fifteen to sixteen, along with a brief phone interview when child participants were in their twenties. She found that earlier work meant more, helping children to internalize the idea that household responsibilities are shared responsibilities—which extended, then, to a sense of responsibility and empathy in other areas of their lives.

I don’t want to make too much of a small study, and there’s really no need. All the research in this area does is confirm what we already know. The new boyfriend who rises to help his hosts clear the table when meeting his partner’s family, the young employee who steps up to help employees in other jobs, the student who doesn’t just finish her lab work but makes sure her work area is ready for the next class—those kids are more self-sufficient, better prepared for adulthood, and more successful in relationships with family and friends. Success is not all about gold stars and letter grades.

So How Do We Make Chores Happen?

Our family history of chores is mixed. Our kids do farm work that most others don’t, which they would argue should count when I’m considering how much they help around the house (I disagree). For household chores, though, I’d rate my performance at about a C. I suspect we’re average, my husband and I. We have tried every single available system for assigning and enforcing chores, and after more than fifteen years as parents, we achieved children who mostly clear their own dishes, including one who does it every time and one who has to be reminded almost every time. That was it. They knew how to do a variety of other things, particularly cooking things, which might go on the credit side of our ledger, but they do not actually do them unless we demand it, or at least not in a useful way. (Okay, brownies are useful. But it’s just not what I mean.)

They fed the dogs and cats and chickens, albeit with much stomping and dish slamming and grumping about siblings who didn’t have to do the job when it was their week and the general unfairness of a life that includes opening a can of cat food once daily. I’d estimate that I chose to feed the animals myself rather than endure the fuss about half of the time. Maybe more often. There was a child assigned to empty the dishwasher daily, to set the table, to clear the table, to do the dishes, and to take out the trash—but if we didn’t demand that those things happen, they didn’t.

What had we tried? Star charts. Reward chips that could be cashed in at the Mom Store. Fines for failure to perform. Bonuses for stellar performance. Offering their allowance in the form of single dollars in a cup and taking a dollar out every time a chore wasn’t done. Docking allowances for complaining about chores. Countless other strategies that I have forgotten.

Here’s what I’ve learned, through my own experience and interviews with other parents: any of those things can work. So why didn’t they work for us? Because we didn’t stick with them. We got tired of the effort of implementing the charts. We foolishly promised rewards that involved things like trips to the ice-cream store that we did not want to do. We got angry and punished inconsistently. And, again and again, we gave up, and no one was happy—because as much as they fussed about chores, the kids didn’t want to have to watch us griping about doing them, either. It started to seem as though “happy” was unobtainable.

Have we found a way to make it better? Yes. And we certainly got happier—kids and parents alike. Some families really have got it figured out—they’ve established routines that have been working decently for years; they’re comfortable with the amount of reminding required, and their family is in a good place with this one.

Here’s what those parents had to say about making chores a happier part of family life, and how we used their advice to change.

THEY’RE NOT CHORES, THEY’RE LIFE SKILLS

Laundry, loading a dishwasher, cooking a meal, keeping a living space orderly—when you do them, they’re chores. But when you teach your children to do them, they’re life skills. Cleaning a shower is not rocket science, but it does require some coaching, starting with the fact that a shower—which is just filled with soap and water, right?—has to be cleaned at all. You don’t want to raise that roommate you once had who put greasy dishes in the cabinet because he didn’t know how to wash them, or the babysitter who made boxed macaroni and cheese for my children by opening the box and the cheese packet, pouring both into the pan, adding water and then turning on the heat.

Looked at that way, it’s easier to see the persistence it’s going to take to persuade your child to do a job correctly, without you standing over her, in a different light. Restoring a kitchen to order after a meal is a skill adults need—as is the acceptance that sometimes you do that even though you do not want to. Even though you are tired, or would rather watch TV, or still have work to do, you still get the taco stains and shredded cheese off the counter.

In her book How to Raise an Adult, Julie Lythcott-Haims, a former dean of freshmen at Stanford University, described the life-skill-building strategy a friend developed for building skills in children:

It’s easier to get our kids through those first four steps when we remind ourselves that if we don’t, they’ll start off at step five in a dorm room or an apartment filled with empty food containers and unwashed dishes: you deal with the cockroaches.

STICK WITH IT AND THEN STICK WITH IT SOME MORE

I was joking earlier in the chapter when I said it took five years for a child to learn to clear a plate from the table without being asked—but I might not be far off. Most parents whose kids do specific chores regularly describe a process that takes not days or weeks, but months, and probably years, no matter when you start.

“My son has to clean his room, water the plants, and clean the toilets before he is allowed screen time on weekends,” Sarah Maxell Crosby, a mother in White River Junction, Vermont, said. “We’ve been doing this for about two years; he’ll be seven this month. For several months, he would drag it out, not getting screen time until Sunday afternoon, or at all, if he was really resistant, but we stuck to our guns, and the time to completion became shorter. Now, most Saturdays, he has finished his chores before I even wake up.”

She’s describing a process that took months to implement and more than a year to feel confident in. Other parents say much the same. “It took time and persistence.” “Reiteration and patience.” “Training and follow-up.” “Tolerating the complaints and resistance.” “I did have to hang in there for a lot of whining and incompetence for a while.” “My kids are now ten and fifteen—they’ve been assigned simple chores forever, but it’s taken this long to have some peace with some of them!!” Parents who stop and start, change chores and strategies, and give up and do it all themselves for months on end—like me—will find themselves, as I have, back at square one again and again.

Deborah Gilboa, the pediatrician whose youngest child, at seven, is responsible for the family laundry (and whose three older children manage other tasks that help the whole household), says sticking to the plan (without making it bigger than it has to be) has been a key to her family’s success. “I don’t expect them to enjoy it,” she says. She just expects them to do their part. Over the years, the family has learned that while some flexibility is required, adjusting to changing schedules doesn’t mean everyone doesn’t contribute. If a child who is expected to empty the dishwasher will be gone all day and the dishwasher has run, “I’ll throw them some compassion,” she says, but that favor—emptying the dishwasher so that others can fill it—comes with a text offering a choice of other things that need to be done.

Julie Lythcott-Haims says she didn’t really begin to require chores with any consistency until her children were ten and twelve (not so coincidentally, about when she began writing her book). “They were all, ‘WHAT?!’” she says. Now fifteen and seventeen, they need little reminding to do their own chores (laundry, taking the trash bins to the curb, setting and clearing the table, unloading the dishwasher, and dealing with trash and recycling). “It’s fun to hear them negotiating over whose turn it is to do what. And my elder is great at doing things ‘for’ the younger to be nice.”

Which sounds fantastic—but don’t focus on whether your kids would ever reach the point of helping one another out with chores. Focus on the fact that even someone who literally wrote the book on raising independent kids didn’t start her kids off as young as she wished she had, and had to go through the same long days, weeks, months, and years of prodding that we all do before it got better. You don’t have to get it right every time. When it comes to getting kids to do chores, you just have to keep trying.

MAKE CHORES A HABIT, AND GIVE THE HABIT TIME TO STICK

When I first set up our chores, they were a timing mishmash. The child assigned to “laundry” could arguably do it any time, while the child feeding the dog needed to perform precisely at six (our dogs can tell time better than I can in that respect). Then I read Gretchen Rubin’s book on forming habits, Better Than Before, along with Charles Duhigg’s The Power of Habit, and realized that I was inadvertently making it harder to turn chores into any kind of a routine. The regular chores now come paired with a repeated activity, one to be done as soon as you get downstairs in the morning, one right before dinner, and one after dinner. It’s easier to do something every day than once in a while. Tying a chore to something that happens daily makes it much easier to remember.

But for a habit to stick, it has to be practiced regularly. The parents I spoke to who were happiest about the ways their children contributed to the running of the house didn’t assign daily chores, or weekly chores, or even monthly chores.

They assigned a chore for a year. A year.

A year of laundry. A year of lunch-making. A year of loading the dishwasher after dinner. That’s true in pediatrician Deborah Gilboa’s family, and in Jennifer Flanders’s large family as well (Flanders runs the Flanders Family Homelife website, a resource with a Christian message for homeschoolers and large families). More than two decades ago, when her children’s ability to make messes outpaced her ability and willingness to clean them up, Flanders decided to abandon her mother’s approach (“to let them help when they wanted to help”) in favor of a system she hoped would teach all of her kids, regardless of gender, to do everything that has to be done to run a household. Every child is expected to keep a tidy room and to make the bed daily; beyond that, each has a responsibility for the year: set the table, load the dishwasher, sort the laundry, etc.

“By the time the year is over, they’re efficient and they’ve stopped complaining,” she says. “Sometimes they’ve come up with a way to do it that’s better than mine.”

Giving a child a chore for the year means that chore can really become an established part of the routine, for both parent and child. It also puts a little more slack in the system—feeding the dogs Friday night because a child is at a soccer game isn’t as big a deal if that child still has 364 days of dog-feeding ahead. “I’ll sometimes just help out, and sometimes I’ll tell them that because they weren’t there to do it, they’ve got something else to do,” says Flanders. A full year of a chore gives a child the opportunity to really master both the chore itself and the will it takes to get up and do it over and over and over again.

Flanders gives easier jobs to younger children (sometimes manufacturing a job for a child that’s too young for most things) and graduates them to more difficult chores as they age. At the end of the year, “they do get a little bit of say in what they get next, but not much,” she says. Eventually everyone gets every job and learns to do it right.

In the Flanders family, most chores are done at the same time, usually daily, and the family works together to get all the jobs done, a routine that keeps the kids on track. Deborah Gilboa ties the timing of weekly chores to privileges. In her son’s case, it’s “no screens on Sunday until the laundry is done”—a particular challenge, she says, if there’s a football game on. On weekdays, chores must be done before anyone can play or have screen time.

“I think one important thing, though, is that I don’t get offended when they don’t remember,” she says. “But I don’t ever let them off the hook.”

That’s a message echoed by many parents, and a reassuring one. When it comes to chores, it’s important to separate two goals—that our children do the work, and that they remember to do the work without prompting. Both are great, but it’s getting the job done consistently that really matters.

“As long as they do it, I wouldn’t feel bad about having to ask every single time,” Susan D’Entremont, a mother in Albany, told me. “My oldest is eighteen and she’s finally started doing things without being asked.” Doing it without being reminded can wait until the next battle.

EXPECT HELP

One friend wrote this on Facebook:

My kids have been doing chores since they were tiny. They all unload the dishwasher if it is full of clean dishes, do their own laundry, make their beds, clean communal areas, and take out recycling and garbage without being reminded. My youngest daughter loves to sweep the foyer and my older daughter cooks if I am not feeling well. The boys are college age but still mow the yard in the summer and spring. I don’t know why they are like this. They have never been paid to do chores or rewarded for it. I have always told them we are a team and that every team member plays an important role in making the family run smoothly. I also have always done chores with them. So . . . yeah. I don’t know, but I am grateful. Also, my kids are typical teens and young adults. We butt heads and argue. We are far from perfect . . . but they do chores and four of five have jobs outside the home. Personality maybe. Other responders have mentioned consistency. That is also a huge part of it.

She doesn’t know why her kids are the way they are—but I do. I don’t think it ever occurred to her that they wouldn’t help, and so they do. Hers is a large family, with a strong tradition of service based on their religious faith, and they are surrounded by a community with similar values. Hard work is part of the package.

For some families, the expectation that everyone will contribute seems to be baked in. It can come with religious practice, yes, as it does with my friend and with the Flanders family, but it can also come with a sustainable living ethos, or farm work, or a home or family business. There’s something about an accepted need to all pull together that turns kids into part of the team. I’ve singled out this friend, but I’ve seen it again and again, and I imagine you have, too—the children in the family that runs the local restaurant, or the CSA, or whose single mother runs a sales business out of their home—those children know how to work, and they do. But if that’s not your family, you can still use the mind-set. Farms, family businesses, family service work—those take a lot of effort, but so does running any household. It takes everyone.

You can declare it a need, and even tie it to a change in your life, if there’s a reason you’re looking to your kids for more help. Or you can just own your previous failures. Jessica Lahey, my friend and neighbor and author of The Gift of Failure: How the Best Parents Let Go So Children Can Succeed, told her two sons that she’d been doing too much for them, and it was time for that to change (proving, as with Julie Lythcott-Haims, that there is nothing like writing a book about raising children with life skills to light a fire under a parent). Expect help. Demand it, insist on it, stand over your children until they give it. You deserve their support—and they deserve to be allowed to contribute, even if they don’t think they want to.

DON’T PAY KIDS FOR CHORES UNLESS YOU’D PAY SOMEONE ELSE

Parents who give their children an allowance tend to fall into two camps—those who consider the allowance an exchange for chores, and those who do not. My New York Times colleague Ron Lieber, the author of The Opposite of Spoiled, has convinced me to remain firmly in the non-payment camp. In his view, an allowance is a tool to teach children to value and manage money, while chores are an expectation for anyone who is a part of the family.

Why? In part, because if you’re “paying” your kids to do chores, there will likely come a point when they’ll just shrug. Fine. Take it away, I have the money Grandma sent me for my birthday, or I don’t want to buy anything anyway. More importantly, although getting paid for work is a part of adult life, most chores fall into the category of things we do without pay, like brushing our teeth and feeding our pets (or, for that matter, our children). “I don’t even get out of bed unless I get paid” may make a funny T-shirt, but it’s a terrible approach to life.

That said, there are times when you will pay a child to do a chore. At our house, I’ll pay a kid for some things I’d pay an adult to do, like lawn work, although I don’t pay older children for babysitting younger ones. I might pay a child to do a sibling’s chore, if the task was large enough and the sibling unavailable (usually those chores involve chickens and a driving snowstorm). Once I paid a kid five bucks to make me a batch of Rice Krispies treats. (What can I say? I had a craving. You do you.) Lieber agrees that some things are worth paying for. He had a great suggestion for “big, nasty, one-off chores” that I’ll be trying: “Post the chore with green cash money pinned to a bulletin board—first kid to complete the task gets the money.”

He also endorses paying for excellent work—a performance bonus, if you will, for, say, a week of doing a chore without being reminded, or picking up the slack for an injured sibling.

It’s tempting to take allowance away for excessive complaining or for not getting the work done, although I haven’t found that to be a successful tactic (maybe because I’m usually doing it in anger). “We also dock allowance if chores are not done competently or for too much complaining. But this doesn’t work as well as the more positive strategies,” says Patty Chang Anker, a mother of two from Westchester County, New York. Taking away allowance after the fact doesn’t really help you achieve the goal of a child who gets the chores done, and it lets a parent off the hook for the hard work of enforcing the requirement that a child contribute at the moment when the contribution is necessary. It’s a cop-out, and that (along with our inconsistent application) is probably why it doesn’t work.

WORK TOGETHER, OR ALL AT THE SAME TIME

“We have Power Hour on the weekend for chores,” says Shannan Ball Younger, a mother in Naperville, Illinois. “It’s scheduled, not every single weekend but at least twice a month, and everyone participates.” That rhyme is popular. “We do an ‘hour of power’ on Friday nights where everybody spends one hour diligently cleaning/decluttering and then we all watch a movie afterward,” says Liz Whalley, a mother of two from Seattle.

Also popular is the idea of all doing the chores together, at a set time, for a set time, often with music or a fun reward to follow. “We didn’t hire a cleaning person when we moved to a new city,” says Abby Klemmer, a mother in Birmingham, Michigan. “Now, every two weeks we do a family cleanup day. My kids clean their bedrooms and bathrooms, change their bed linens, vacuum. We do pay them a few dollars for this, but it’s not optional.”

“It’s amazing how much can get done in a relatively brief amount of time and it helps with the idea of ‘we all live here so we all pitch in,’” says Younger. In Berryville, Arkansas, Laura Hudgens’s three kids work in rotating zones—the kitchen, the living spaces, and the entrance to their home. When they were younger, every day at four o’clock they did a “twenty-minute tidy” in their zones, but as they got older and busier, the time became hard to stick to and the plan slipped. This year, Hudgens reinstated it, but she now allows the kids to choose when they work. “One of the best things about zones is how it frees me from having to worry about assigning chores,” she says. “I don’t have to think about whose turn it is to vacuum or clean out the lint trap. And the kids have already stopped arguing about that kind of thing.”

As Laura discovered, keeping to a set time weekly gets more difficult with older, more active children, but if you can find a time that works for almost everyone almost every week, that will do, and work much better than rescheduling chore time every week. Consistency is your friend, and a moving target will probably never be hit in this instance. It will involve complaining, almost every week, almost certainly, about whatever child “never has to do their share,” but it’s not as if there would be no complaining if everyone were present. They’d just be complaining about something else.

CONSEQUENCES

In our house, if you fail to do your own personal “chores” well, or at all (like putting your own hockey gear in the bag that needs to be brought to your practice after school, or putting last night’s homework in your backpack), it comes with natural consequences. I have accidentally put many an assignment in the recycling—easily fished out, yes, but since it’s not sitting on the counter to remind you, it probably doesn’t get turned in on time. And it’s unlikely that I, who played hockey only briefly, will manage to take every single piece of gear off the drying rack (there are so many), and that I’ll be able to pick out your shin guards from your sister’s (gross!). And I certainly won’t check to see if you got it all in your bag. Both that job, and the consequences, are on you.

One of our kids arrived at hockey missing a key piece of equipment so many times that he had to sit and watch practice three times in a row—and the fourth time, I got an email from the coach. “Where,” he asked, “is [child]?” “Well,” I replied, “I dropped him off . . .” After a few minutes of mild worry (we live in a small town, and that child knows everyone at the rink), the coach emailed again. The child had been found hiding in the bathroom, too embarrassed to admit to having to sit out practice once again. Consequences provided, with no help from me.

But with most household chores, the “natural consequences” bother us more than they do our children. They’re blind to overflowing trash and dishes in the sink. If they cared about a clean room, they’d have cleaned it. Which means that if we want to use consequences as motivation, we have to come up with something they care about—and we have to ensure that it’s not an empty threat.

What might that consequence be? The loss of screen time is the most popular (with children who have their own devices, suggests Ron Lieber, the Wi-Fi password might change). Maybe you won’t drive a child to practice until the chickens are in or the dog is fed. Suddenly, the coach who requires laps if anyone is late is in charge of your consequences, which is a beautiful thing. Choose something that matters to your child, and take it away.

LET KIDS PICK THEIR CHORES

When our kids were younger, we rotated chores, because even if you’d actually prefer to feed the chickens, it is not fair if you’re the only one who does it. But especially with older kids, it’s possible that they’ll just agree—one would rather wash the dishes, the other would rather clear the table and wipe the counters. “We sat down with a huge list of things that get done around the house and I let them pick things they disliked the least, explaining that this is how my husband and I originally divvied up the work—I do the cooking because I don’t really mind it. He does the dishes because I really hate that,” says Karen Smith from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, of her two kids.

“Speaking as someone who did a lot of chores as a kid,” says Melody Schreiber, a mother in Washington, DC, “I would listen to the kids about which chores they despise and which ones they enjoy. I hate dishes but love vacuuming and laundry, so my mom played that up. And if I wanted to complain, she reminded me that I chose them.”

The most popular area of choice is dinner—kids who cook (and even a nine- or ten-year-old should be able to cook a simple meal—watch MasterChef Junior if you don’t believe me) can also choose. “I recently started asking my kids to each make dinner one night a week,” says New Jersey mother Aileen Carroll. Her seventeen-year-old and two sixteen-year-olds each sign up for a night weekly, and she makes sure that they have a plan so that items are defrosted or ingredients are on hand. “It works surprisingly well and no more complaints about the menu!”

IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START

Maybe you just never established a chore routine at your house—first the kids were too young, then you were too busy—and now they’re however old (five, eight, fifteen) and you’re wishing you’d made this happen. As with anything, you can’t start any younger. But it’s really not too late. One strategy, suggested by Dr. Gilboa, is to address the entire question of whether you treat your children with the respect due to their age and ability together. Most kids, she points out, “are so annoyed with you that you don’t understand how grown-up they are, and you treat them like a baby.”

So talk to them, she said. Tell them—and I mean this sincerely, not with a trace of irony—that you haven’t done right by them. There are privileges they feel old enough for, and there are responsibilities they are old enough for, and they can earn the privileges by stepping up to the responsibilities. Say, “I’m going to teach you to do the laundry, and once you can do it, we’ll start the clock, and after you’ve shown me that you can handle that for a month, you can take the bus to the mall alone,” or whatever you’re willing to let them do.

“Grown-up privileges are tied to grown-up responsibilities,” she says. “That’s the way life works, and it’s the way you should work.”

START WHEN LIFE CHANGES

Many parents who have been at-home caregivers go back to work when their children reach a certain age. Make that a moment to bring about the chore transition. You’re going to need more help, and that’s not an occasion for guilt, but rather an opportunity. Other life changes can present the same need, whether it’s long term and ongoing like a partner who deploys for the military or a decision to bring another child into the family, or it’s a temporary measure because of family need, a death or divorce, a job loss, a move, or the purchase of a family business.

Some of those circumstances are obviously not things you’d choose (to say the least), but addressing the physical challenges they’re going to present for your family as well as the emotional ones directly can give everyone something different to hold on to (and even something different to be upset about). Change can be very hard, but change can also allow children and families to grow.

LET THEM WHINE

Once they’re past that “helpful” stage, most children really don’t want to do anything that could be described as a chore. (Sadly, this usually coincides with their becoming able to actually help.) Or maybe they do like some chores, but they don’t want to do them when you need them done. And any child with siblings is going to know, for certain-sure and with all her heart and soul, that she does more than they do, and she’s going to say so.

That’s okay. In this case if you see something, don’t always say something becomes if you hear something, pretend you didn’t. It’s so easy to let the griping get to you. Really? Really they’re complaining about feeding the dog when you just worked a full day and made dinner and you’ve got laundry to do and a full list of other stuff before bed? Worse, whining over chores can really hit us where we live. Who but a totally entitled, spoiled child would put on this kind of production over clearing the table?

More than anything else, the complaining over simple chores can make us doubt our entire parenting strategy. We hate “making them do chores” as a piece of discipline in part because their reaction makes us feel terrible on so many levels. We hate that they’re unhappy, we hate that our asking them to help us out would make them unhappy, and we hate the whole process of feeling our own emotions while dragging them through their resistance.

But it’s deeply ironic that we often choose to skip the whole thing (thus increasing the odds that we really are raising a spoiled and entitled child who can’t do anything for herself) instead of just skipping something simpler: our reaction.

So what if they complain? So what if they don’t want to do it? You probably don’t want to do it, either; you’ve just learned that complaining only makes it worse. They’ll learn that, too, eventually. Meanwhile, let it go when you can, for the sake of your own happiness.

A few other simple pieces of advice:

Lower your standards. Not, perhaps, with respect to clean dishes—but there really are multiple ways to successfully load a dishwasher.

Simplify the chore. “I gave my three daughters their own laundry duty as early as possible,” says Dana Laquidara, a mother of three now-adult children in Upton, Massachusetts. “I taught them to wash the whole load in cold when their hamper (which doubled as a laundry basket) was full. No sorting required.”

Keep a few good lines in your pocket. It helps to have a few go-to things to say when you’d rather shout, “Just shut up and do it!” Here are some ideas: “We do chores ‘CQC’—cheerfully, quickly, and completely,” says Laura Hudgens. “When they’re whining, I ask them if they really think they have that horrible of a situation or if they thought that maybe it wasn’t that bad, and then get back to me,” says Judi Fusco Kledzik, who lives with her husband and three kids in California. “I try to take the path of commiseration,” says Rebecca Wadsworth Blythe, also from California, adding, “‘ I know! I hate laundry, too! Just imagine how horrible it would be if one person had to [gasp] fold and put away laundry for the whole family!’” Just imagine.

Teach them how to remember. Kledzik teaches her three daughters to use the same tools she uses: notes, phone reminders, setting something right by the door the night before so it won’t be forgotten in the morning.

Have someone else teach them. “As a young widow trying to run a business and raise two kids, I quickly discovered I lacked the attention, patience, and perseverance to get them to do their chores. My solution was to hire an after-school nanny. He was that impartial third party who could teach them how to do laundry, wash dishes, vacuum, and apply the implacable follow-through they needed. He saved my sanity and allowed me to enjoy the kids when we were together,” says Joy Imboden Overstreet. Now a grandmother who lives in Oregon, she says, “when I visit my busy daughter, I am the one who rides herd on her kids.”

Settle in for the Long Haul (Or, What Happened at Our House)

It’s still a struggle to get the chores done at our house—but it’s a struggle that we’re happier about. As I interviewed parents for this chapter, I realized more and more that children who just do this stuff every time without a reminder, whether it’s clearing a plate or doing the laundry, are few and far between, and that it takes a long time—longer than I ever would have imagined—for most of us to get there. And children that do their chores without complaining are even more rare. The children who happily get up and clear the table at your house? I talked to their parents. They’re not like that at home.

Really establishing a chore routine requires a consistency that we can rarely achieve at our house. The one area where we achieve that is the horse barn. Every morning, before school, we go to the barn to help with whatever feeding and mucking is required (it varies by season and weather). Three things make this work: it happens every weekday at the same time; I’m working, too; and the job has to be done. It’s the essence of routine, and it gets more difficult (and the complaining increases) in the summer or any time the routine is interrupted.

When it comes to household chores, though, the routine is always changing, which meant we needed to find consistency in something else. After interviewing parents for this chapter, I made changes to my expectations for my kids, and for myself and my spouse. First, my husband and I agreed: chores matter, and we’re going to expect that they’re done, even when there is homework, even when there are sports, even when it would be far easier to just do it ourselves. Then, we changed our approach. Each child has one significant chore for the year (making lunches, feeding household animals, emptying the dishwasher, or taking out the trash nightly). The remaining chores—the before- and after-dinner ones—rotate monthly instead of weekly, and the children sat down and agreed on how the after-dinner cleanup, in particular, could be fairly divided. It’s early days yet, but the shift seems to be working. There’s somehow more gravitas to “this is your September chore” than there is to “it’s your turn to clear the table.” Still, there is complaining, and there is forgetting, and there is always some degree of resentment that someone else’s load is somehow lighter.

Accepting those things—that this takes time, that it’s important enough to make the time, and that no matter what we say or do, our children are going to complain—made us a lot happier. We expect to remind our children about their chores, and we don’t feel like failed parents every time we do it, which helps us to skip the yelling and just say it again. We expect to need to give direction and to periodically require that a chore done poorly be done over. It’s our job to teach them to do theirs.

What’s consistent isn’t the chores, or their timing, or what it takes to get the children to get the work done. It’s something we control: our expectation that our children will help us daily as well as when we ask and that they’ll do their jobs right. When we make that the focus, as opposed to their memory or their attitude, we can feel good about what we’re doing even when things don’t seem to be going so well.