My family was invited to a friend’s home for dinner. When I walked into their home, the teens were watching television, and the mom was running around the kitchen, frantically doing everything.
I said to her, “Why aren’t you getting the kids to help?”
“It’s too much trouble.”
“I don’t know,” I said. “What you are doing now looks like trouble to me.”
Defining the Problem
Household chores are part of everyday life. While all kids can help out in some way, teenagers should be doing advanced chores, the kind that they will have to be doing when they move out. They need to learn to clean up after themselves, set and clear the table, load and unload the dishwasher (or wash the dishes), do laundry, work in the yard, and cook. Being in a family means taking part in family responsibilities that need getting done.
But there is a deeper, more important reason parents need to require their kids to do chores. Doing chores helps your teen be who she was created to be. Life, as designed by God, can most simply be described as two things: connecting and doing, or love and task. Everything we do that is meaningful is either about relationships, love, and connectedness, or about tasks, responsibilities, and work.
In fact, the first command given to the human race had to do with tasks: God blessed them and said, “Be fruitful and increase in number; fill the earth and subdue it.”25 We were designed to be fruitful and to take stewardship over the world. So when your teen does the dishes, she is taking part in God’s grand design.
But that’s not all. Life requires adults to fulfill many tasks: work and career responsibilities, household maintenance responsibilities, parenting responsibilities, finances, and the like. When parents require teens to do chores, they are helping prepare their teens to succeed in their future responsibilities. Far better for teens to have years of experience of doing certain chores, because they can then move smoothly into taking on the grown-up tasks of life.
Handling the Problem
Most of the time, when chores get neglected, it’s as much the fault of the parent as it is the teen. Parents fall into a few common traps that result in nothing being done. Once you are aware of and resolve these traps, your job is much easier. When parents are the problem, it’s typically for one of three reasons: they fail to provide clear structure, they give up because it feels like too much trouble, or they fail to insist on chores because of all the other demands on the teen’s life.
Establish a clear structure. Of all the problems this book addresses, chores are probably the easiest to structure. Give your teen specific responsibilities to be done at a certain level of competence and with some regularity, and establish a consequence if they are not done. Simply say, “No phone or television until the kitchen is clean,” or “No going out on the weekend until the yard is done.” Such arrangements have meaning for teens; they see how what they want is dependent on what they do.
Many great charts are available for helping kids do their chores. I just searched online for “family chore charts” and found almost 45,000 websites on the topic!
But most of the time, instead of structuring house maintenance, parents tell their teen to clean up better after himself, and then they get annoyed when he doesn’t, which is most of the time.
So if you haven’t already, take the time to set up your expectations regarding chores, tailored to your own family. If you haven’t taken this step, you are likely doing too many chores yourself. And don’t reward kids for doing their household chores. You might reward a four-year-old the first time he cleans up his room. But a teen who expects a reward for doing what’s expected will be set up for disappointment when he doesn’t get regularly rewarded by a spouse for cleaning up.
Always require some chores. Your teen may have other legitimate demands on her life. Homework, sports, cultural activities, social outings, and church can take a lot of time. Some parents feel like they are already asking so much of their kids that it isn’t fair to insist that they do chores. Others struggle because the teen isn’t around when the chores need to be done. If the trash is to be taken out on Thursday night, and your teen has sports and studies until late on Thursdays, how can she help take out the trash?
These are realities, and there is no easy solution. If your teen is doing well in school and life, with a good attitude, and it takes all her time to accomplish her goals, you may need to require less of her. You certainly don’t want to overwhelm her.
But do require something. Teens should help out by doing regular tasks at home. Chores are a very important developmental part of life. If there isn’t time for chores, it may be a sign that your teen is too busy and needs your help in balancing his life. Sometimes the parent needs to step in and have the teen curtail some activities.
Enforce the chores. Following through with consequences takes work, but the chore of the parent is to enforce the chore of the teen. This can be a lot of effort and trouble, at least until doing chores becomes a habit in the teen’s mind.
In many homes, the parent and teen engage in a waiting game when it comes to chores. If the teen can patiently protest, argue, sneak past, and defy, the parent may get worn down and give up. The sign that the parent is waving the white flag is the classic, “Never mind. It’s easier for me to do it than to get you to do it!”
If you have said and done this, you are not alone. All parents do it. But take the hard road here. Do the difficult work of investing in your adolescent. If you can stay consistent with reasonable and fair consequences over time, you will outwait your teen, and things should become better. Never forget the goal: a young adult who knows how to be responsible, how to work, and how to take care of himself. You are preventing a blowout later in life.
Keep in mind that avoidance and defiance can also be part of the problem. There is a big, interesting world out there, and your teen’s life is quickly moving in that direction, not toward home. You must always remember that the next time you feel abandoned by your teen because he didn’t do an assigned chore. His neglect often is not about you but about your adolescent’s immature efforts to join his world. He needs you to help him learn to fulfill his responsibilities before he runs out and joins the world!
So don’t personalize your teen’s chore avoidance and protest. Just lovingly and patiently stick with the consequences until it becomes more trouble for him to fight than to take out the garbage.
You Can Do It!
Chores, which sound boring and mundane, provide something very valuable for your teen: the gifts of self-control, diligence, faithfulness, and responsibility. Whichever of those 45,000 charts you pick, if it works for you, stick with it!