6Chores
WENDY KLEIN AND MARJORIE HARNESS GOODWIN
Children in societies around the world acquire skills through their routine participation in household work activities, and mastering these tasks prepares them to become competent members of their communities.1 Not long ago, American family life was organized in a similar manner, with all family members, even small children, taking on a set of domestic responsibilities. According to the sociologist Viviana Zelizer,2 the shift in attitudes to children's work in the United States began toward the end of the nineteenth century and continued into the twentieth. Historical examinations of children's lives emphasize the changes that occurred along with industrialization and the institutionalization of schooling. As the locus of economic production moved from the home to outside spheres of employment such as factories and the marketplace, laws regulating children's work in the labor force limited their involvement. These policies, in turn, curtailed children's economic contributions, and people began to have smaller families.3 Children went from being considered an economic asset to the family to becoming emotionally “priceless.”4 The concept of childhood as a distinct and critical time period for development and cultivation, a notion once restricted to the upper class, was recognized and embraced by society as a whole.5 Among the middle class in particular, children's time became increasingly occupied with schoolwork and preparation for their professional futures.
In recent years, the routine inclusion of chores in children's schedules has generally fallen by the wayside in middle-class family life. Most children are still expected to take on a few domestic tasks, but the amount of time they spend on household work has gradually decreased.6 The decline in children's contributions can be linked, in part, to shifts in parents’ priorities and parenting approaches. Parents typically enroll their children in a number of after-school activities and academic preparatory courses geared to their future success.7 These outside commitments may not leave sufficient time for establishing routines that require children to consistently perform domestic tasks. More significantly, the ways parents and children relate to one another interactionally have also shifted, influencing children's understandings of their roles in the household. Starting in the mid-twentieth century, a more egalitarian relationship between parents and children began to overtake former structures of hierarchy that involved strict adherence to respecting and obeying parents’ demands. As the ethos of questioning authority infiltrated the home, several domains of family life no longer conformed to a dominant model, and patterns of child socialization began to vary widely.
Previous studies of middle-class American families indicate that children's routine participation in household work is not necessarily a prevailing practice, and socialization into domestic responsibilities is not a high priority.8 While a few popular books on parenting in the United States published in the past decade argue against overscheduling and overprotecting children,9 others, for example, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother, by the Yale law professor Amy Chua, recommend a highly structured schedule of activities and a strong emphasis on academic achievement, leaving little or no time for chores. Yet we show that the consistent effort to involve children in housework may be crucial to their development of life skills, independence, and responsibility. In addition, analyses of the physical and spatial organization of parent-child exchanges reveal that these interactional dimensions play an important role in establishing and sustaining a shared understanding of household routines.
THE ANDERSON FAMILY: “THEY HAVE TO EARN THEIR PRIVILEGES EVERY DAY"
“This is something Sandra is supposed to do,” Ed Anderson tells his wife on a Saturday morning as he takes a full bag of trash out from under the sink. Ed has just finished washing the breakfast dishes, and Sandra, his ten-year-old daughter, is in her bathrobe and pajamas watching a video in the living room when she overhears her name. “What'd you say?” she asks. Her father summons her into the kitchen: “Sandy, could you come here please? You have a chore I want you to do.” Sandra responds with a long, exasperated sigh, “Uhhhhh,” which displays her great displeasure at being asked to interrupt the video to take on a chore. Her father adds, “I'll go out with you,” but his offer is met with Sandra's emphatic refusal: "No:!” Ed immediately counters with "Yup!,” matching his daughter's insistent tone, and the struggle between father and daughter begins.
In the CELF study, children in many of the families regularly attempted to negotiate, resist, or refuse to carry out tasks.10 Variation across families appears to be tied to a history of inconsistent and unfocused socialization practices for recruiting children to take on responsibilities. In general, the lack of routine expectations and the inconsistency in parental directives promoted extended discussions about children accomplishing self-care such as grooming and household tasks. In contrast, routine task assignment and close parental monitoring of children as they carried out tasks encouraged their awareness of and willingness to assume household responsibilities. Aronsson and Cekaite use the term activity contract to refer to mutual agreements about tasks and when they are to be carried out in Swedish parent-child interactions.11 While children may be aware of their responsibilities for specific chores, they may nonetheless initiate extended negotiations of a particular “contract” by means of stalling or refusal. In Aronsson and Cekaite's study children's subversive responses constituted attempts to enact egalitarian intergenerational relationships. These moves were followed by mild threats about withdrawing favored activities such as watching television or moral justifications for parents’ directives. In the end, the authors propose, these negotiation processes teach children accountability for their actions as well as for their future commitments.
Returning to the battle of wills in the Anderson household, Ed is determined to recruit his daughter Sandra's help and insists that she pause her video. After some hesitation, Sandra complies and enters the kitchen to find out what her father would like her to do.
Anderson Family: Saturday Morning
| SANDRA: | O:h my (hh). ((she eyes the bag of trash)) | |
| FATHER: | You take this bag, | |
| SANDRA: | Outsi:::de? | |
| FATHER: | I'm gonna go with you. | |
| SANDRA: | In the co::ld? | |
| FATHER: | Sandra, list—do you want—do you like your cell phone? This is called earning your cell phone. |
Sandra takes one look at the garbage bag and expresses her displeasure in increasingly high-pitched, elongated tones throughout this exchange. Her father's second offer to help her does not dissuade her resistance. Finally in the last lines above, Ed issues an ultimatum. By tying the domestic task to Sandra's cell phone use, Ed invokes an economic model of household work in which rights and benefits are to be extended in return for labor. In an interview, Ed told us, “I bought her a cell phone the day before yesterday, but she has to earn that. Well, they have to earn everything, including the computer ((pause)) Everything is a privilege . . . They have to earn their privileges every day” in order to learn “how things work in the world.” He added, “And by the way, I'm making it sound like it's easy, it's not,” revealing his awareness of the interactional work required to maintain this ethos in his household. Ed reflects on his own upper-middle-class childhood and discusses how his upbringing has shaped his parenting style: “I think that I was so isolated from lots of the world that, that—that was not a good thing growing up. So, I don't want them to grow up ignorant about how things work in the world, and I want them to know how privileged they are ... I think that's real important.”
Michael Osit suggests in Generation Text: How to Raise Kids in an Age of Instant Everything that treating chores as a means to earning privileges socializes children into a healthy work ethic and discourages a sense of entitlement.12 Yet across the CELF families there was no positive correlation attributed to receiving an allowance for tasks and the quantity of household work children performed. In the Anderson family, this approach to earning privileges might have faltered in that it was applied to very few tasks and, possibly as a consequence, needed to be continually reinforced. The Anderson children fell on the middle to low end of the scale regarding both the quantity of household tasks they carried out and their likelihood to cooperate with parents’ requests. When children's participation is tied to avoiding occasional parental threats or to personal benefits such as monetary or material rewards, children may be less likely to become intrinsically motivated to help others. At the same time, emphasizing the ethos of earning privileges may be an effective way to cultivate an understanding of the material benefits of work and to counter feelings of entitlement.
CHILDREN'S CONTRIBUTIONS AND PARENTAL “INVESTMENT"
Although parents who work full-time may need their children's help with domestic tasks, recent studies have found that in two-parent families, parental work status (full- or part-time) is not correlated with higher rates of children's participation in household work.13 Thus it is not sur- prising that children in the CELF study did not take on a large number of household responsibilities. In fact, only 2.8 percent of the CELF children's activities were devoted to household work, compared to 27.1 percent of mothers’ activities and 14.8 percent of fathers’ activities. Parents’ household work does not include childcare and household management tasks such as planning and paying bills. The tasks we counted as household work were tidying one's bedroom, meal preparation, cleaning tasks, folding laundry, taking out the trash, outside chores, and pet care. When children carried out these activities, they often did so with a parent or sibling. The types of housework that children carried out most often were related to meal preparation, keeping one's bedroom in order, and assorted cleaning activities. In general, parents initiated children's involvement in these household tasks.
Children volunteered to help most often with meal preparation, which included making and serving food as well as setting the table. Food preparation, such as cooking and baking, provided opportunities for parents to apprentice children into tasks they enjoyed, and we observed a great deal of positive displays of emotion, such as laughter, affection, and pride, during these activities.14 As expected, older children engaged in household work activities more frequently than did younger children, reflecting family expectations that older siblings are expected to make greater contributions than their younger counterparts.15 Girls performed a greater range of household care tasks and took on tasks more frequently than did boys in all age groups. Previous studies on children's household work also reflect this imbalance, and not surprisingly, this often mirrors the gendered division of labor between parents within these families.16
There were clear asymmetries in the distribution of household work across CELF family members. Mothers’ chores accounted for 60 percent of the total household workload, while fathers’ chores totaled 27 percent, and children's chores constituted 13.3 percent of all scan sampling observations of household chores. Children's relatively low contributions parallel Blair's findings based on questionnaire data.17 In our study, however, the 13.3 percent figure masks a wide range of participation. In some families, children were never observed carrying out a household task, while in others, children were recorded performing as much as 28 percent of the family's household tasks observed.
In general, school-related activities such as doing homework and studying for tests were given higher priority than helping out with household tasks. A few children in our study stated that their primary responsibility in their families was to attend school and complete their homework assignments, as captured by six-year-old Becky's response to a question about chores: “Well, the job is to go to school. . . that's my job.” Getting homework done on one's own was, indeed, a help to parents. Children who could manage their school assignments saved their parents the daily trials of overseeing this activity. Yet socialization into getting homework done and taking on household tasks promoted somewhat different senses of moral responsibility and attention to the needs of others.
The sociologist Annette Lareau proposes that middle-class parents exercise “concerted cultivation” of children's futures by prioritizing their academic work and scheduling families’ lives around children's extracurricular commitments.18 These parents place a high premium on children acquiring skills entailing social and cultural capital that will ultimately increase their educational opportunities and professional advancement. Lareau illustrates that middle-class parents tend to negotiate with their children and include them in decision making in order to promote more egalitarian relationships. Many of the parents in our study reflect this ideology in the way they structure their lives and interact with their children. Lareau contrasts concerted cultivation with the “natural growth” approach, which she ascribes to working-class and lower-class parents in her study. In these families, partially due to possessing fewer economic resources, parents do not enroll children in many extracurricular activities and allow them to have long periods of unstructured time. These parents tend to use unmitigated directives (imperatives) with their children and to be much less open to negotiation, reflecting a more hierarchical structure regarding rights and obligations in the family. In these families, children appear to be more independent and take on household work and self-care tasks without parental prodding.
The prevalence of inconsistent socialization into taking on household tasks across CELF families resembles the concerted cultivation parenting approach documented by Lareau. Our findings also align with Kusserow's observations of upper-middle-class parents’ emphasis on children's self-expression of feelings and their equal status.19 In Kusserow's study parents felt that asserting power over the child inhibits the child's development. The fallout of such parenting styles, as viewed in the CELF video recordings of family life from morning to nightfall, is that parents often struggled on a daily basis to recruit their children's assistance. This was especially true in families in which parents were more open to negotiation (and whose lives resembled some of the middle-class families in Lareau's study and the upper-middle-class families in Kusserow's study). An examination of interactions in these families sheds light on some of the difficulties that arise and how these issues may be connected to specific child-rearing practices.
THE NEUMAN FAMILY: “I'M NOT GONNA DO IT!"
When parental directives and justifications are open to negotiation on a regular basis and parents often give in, children will be less likely to perform tasks requested of them. One evening after dinner Brian (age eight) is getting ready to play checkers with his mother, Elsie, when his father, Benny, enters the room.
Neuman Family: Sunday Evening
| FATHER: | Let's not play. Son, come here, (you're) gonna help me out with the dishes. C'mon. | |
| BRIAN: | No::: | |
| FATHER: | Yes. Now. C'mon. Then you play. Let's go. | |
| BRIAN: | No uhhh ((sniffs and tears up)) |
Benny attempts to enlist his son's assistance with washing the dinner dishes but is met with Brian's loud, defiant refusal. In a second attempt, his father prioritizes doing chores over playing.20 After a brief discussion about why Brian's older brother is exempt from helping with this chore (he is doing his homework), the conflict continues.
| BRIAN: | Why do I gotta go do the dishes. ((crying)) | |
| FATHER: | We'll do it together. | |
| BRIAN: | No:::. | |
| FATHER: | You can either put it in the sink | |
| —(0.2) | ||
| I—I—I mean put it in the dishwasher, | ||
| (0.4) | ||
| or you can rinse it | ||
| or you can pass it to me, | ||
| You can choose any job you want. | ||
| BRIAN: | No—okay I'll choose a job, | |
| FATHER: | Yeah, | |
| BRIAN: | Me and Mom play checkers—that's a job. | |
| FATHER: | That's not a job, that's a—that's playing. | |
| BRIAN: | I'm not gonna do:it. |
When Brian demands justification for his participation in washing the dishes his father tries to accommodate him by suggesting that the chore would be a joint project; he then offers Brian his choice of tasks. This strategy fails when Brian proposes his own option, which involves continuing to play checkers with his mother. Even though his father makes a logical distinction between a job and playing, Brian refuses to help. His mother then makes an appeal for his help.
| MOTHER: | It would help me out. | |
| FATHER: | Don't you want to help Ma? She cooked. |
The mother's emphasis on her son helping her rather than her husband points to another possible dimension to this interaction. We observed that Brian was often more compliant with his mother than with his father. He and his father had frequent conflicts, and the mother's appeal here references her closer bond with Brian. Yet after this exchange Brian continues to refuse to help with the dishes. His father ends up extracting a promise from him that he will help “next time” and allows him to continue playing the game with his mother.
Brian's father was not alone in inadvertently rewarding a child's resistant behavior.21 As M. H. Goodwin notes, “In situations where children are successful at bargaining . . . children may not gear into the projects their parents propose, and even run away from responsibilities . . . leading to escalations of assertions of authority through threats ... or a parent's giving up in defeat.”22 As discussed earlier, providing options to children may give them a chance to actively exercise their own preferences and take up an agentive stance;23 however, this strategy also indicates that the task is open to negotiation.24
UNPACKING THE INCONSISTENCY PREDICAMENT
One of the biggest obstacles to getting children to help regularly with household tasks was lack of mutually agreed upon routines in everyday family life. When family members shared an understanding of who was responsible for certain tasks, the undertaking of the chore was less likely to be open to negotiation on a daily basis. Similar to the couples discussed in the previous chapter, the lack of a clear family “model” of the division of responsibilities often promoted conflict about household work.
To avoid extended altercations some CELF parents opted to carry out most tasks without their children's assistance. As Jeff, the father in the Marsden family, told us, enforcing chores actually took more time and effort than doing the tasks himself. His approach was to assign chores when he or his wife had time. The result was that on certain occasions the parents took care of the tasks themselves, even when their children were available, and on others these parents either requested or demanded that a child take on the task. The children (ages eight, eleven, and thirteen) appeared to treat the inconsistency as license to refuse, since they did not necessarily view these chores as being their responsibilities.
We observed the same situation in the Beringer-Potts family, in which the parents were just beginning to assign chores to their older child who had just turned eight. When the boy resisted taking on a task, the mother often yelled at him in response and pushed him to get it done. At other times, she took an anything goes attitude, in which she either displayed amusement when her son refused to take on a task or simply ignored his refusals and took care of it herself. Such disparate interactional styles may account, in part, for why her son disregarded most of her requests to carry out a task and did not appear to understand why his mother became upset when he did not comply.
The significance of employing consistent socialization approaches when engaging children in practical tasks is evident when comparing observations of middle-class children growing up in Los Angeles to young children growing up elsewhere in the world. For example, caregivers in Samoa (Polynesia) and Matsigenka (Peruvian Amazon) hold consistent expectations for children's high participation in practical tasks, in contrast to middle-class parents in Los Angeles.25 Similar to the Samoans and Matsigenka, Mayan children in Mexico coordinate their attention to ongoing family activities with little direction from adults to engage them in taking on tasks.26 In these communities socialization into helping others is integral to the development of respect and a moral sense of responsibility. Respect is embodied through children's active attention to learning from and assisting others who are more experienced than they. In contrast, in many of the CELF families school-aged children appeared helpless, with parents assisting them in simple activities such as getting dressed. Cross-cultural studies provide perspective on the variation in socialization practices that have an impact on children's development and household functioning.
THE POLLEN FAMILY: “IS ANYONE LISTENING?"
Despite the prevailing tendency of children in the CELF study to contribute little to household work, they were expected to carry out certain self-care tasks (e.g., bathing, brushing their teeth, grooming). Parents often monitored these straightforward tasks even when children were old enough to carry them out by themselves. For example, on a weekday morning, nine-year-old Linda and seven-year-old Daniel were in the kitchen eating breakfast and watching television before going to school. Their mother, Kelly, called out to them from upstairs.
Pollen Family: Weekday Morning
| MOTHER: | Daniel and Linda? | |
| DANIEL AND LINDA: | ((no response)) | |
| MOTHER: | Daniel and Linda? | |
| DANIEL AND LINDA: | ((no response)) | |
| MOTHER: | EXCUSE ME. | |
| I'M talking to you. | ||
| LINDA: | What? | |
| MOTHER: | YOU should brush your teeth and go to the bathroom when you're done. Okay? | |
| DANIEL AND LINDA: | ((no response)) | |
| MOTHER: | Alright? | |
| DANIEL AND LINDA: | ((no response)) | |
| MOTHER: | HELLO:. | |
| LINDA: | What. | |
| MOTHER: | Brush your teeth and go to the bathroom when you're done. | |
| LINDA: | Alright. | |
| MOTHER: | Thank you. |
Kelly had to make numerous bids for her children's attention before her daughter finally acknowledged her. Nonetheless, she ended the exchange with a “thank you,” signaling that the self-care task was a favor that the children were requested to carry out for their mother rather than something they were responsible for without being asked.
MUTUAL ATTENTION AND PHYSICAL ALIGNMENT
Our study of the many ways in which children are socialized into doing practical household or self-care tasks has led us to appreciate the importance of how parents’ and children's bodies are aligned with respect to one another.27 It is not only the consistency of parental expectations or how parents ask for practical help that is consequential for children's performance of a task but also where parents’ and children's bodies are physically located and aligned. Are parent and child facing each other or otherwise engaged when a practical task needs to be performed? Are they in the same room or communicating at a distance? Different kinds of routine interactional body alignments have consequences for how parents and children coordinate joint attention and collaborate together in everyday household activities.28 As Goodwin notes, “Successful trajectories of directive sequences entail vigilant work on the part of parents—their full engagement in pursuing a response from children in the midst of the multiple competing activities that occupy their lives and demand their attention.”29
Kelly, for example, often issued recycled directives to her children about self-care tasks when she was not in the same room as her children. Kelly and her husband Tommy's requests tended to be successful only when they were in face-to-face proximity with their children. Yet their children spent a great deal of time playing video games and watching television. As a result these parents often competed with various media and on-line activities for their attention, a situation we observed in several other families. When parents attempted to recruit their children's help while the children were “plugged in” conflicts often ensued.30 These tensions were more likely to escalate into extended altercations if media or on-line activities were not brought to an end before parents made their expectations clear. Children who were more frequent media users, however, did not necessarily help less with household work. Children's assistance appeared to depend on how effective parents were at gaining and sustaining their children's attention as well as how clearly parents articulated their expectations and monitored their children's follow-through.
Tulbert and Goodwin,31 in their study of how children were asked to brush their teeth, found an array of disparate bodily alignments. As in Kelly's exchange with her children above, when a parent was in another room or was competing with a distraction such as television, children were much less likely to disengage from their current activity to acknowledge or carry out the parent's request. Establishing a boundary between activities appeared to be consequential. For example, turning off the television before asking children to take on a task allowed parents to harness and refocus their children's full attention. Moreover, monitoring the activity by providing guidance to the child when necessary was also important in overseeing the follow-through of the task.
This point is related to the cross-cultural observations of adult-child interactions in communities such as the Matsigenka and Samoa, where very young children are socialized to attend to what other people are doing in their surroundings.32 Early repeated orientation into social attention promotes children's learning of activities and their competent assistance in household routines at a young age. Similarly, children in highland Peru develop a heightened sense of self-esteem, independence, and responsibility through their involvement at an early age in sibling caregiving, textile work, horticulture, herding, and cleaning.33 This is not simply a phenomenon observed in small-scale or developing societies. In Japan, for example, children are socialized into notions of respect and responsibility through tending to their environments. Although Japanese children are not expected to assist much in the home, they are responsible for soji (cleaning chores) at school, including mopping floors, cleaning bathrooms, and dusting. Participating in soji is viewed as an important aspect of students’ moral education.34
While parents in Los Angeles tended to be highly accommodating to their children, a few did regularly engage them in household work. Researchers in our study closely examined the daily activities of one of these families, the Randolphs, to whom we now turn.
THE RANDOLPH FAMILY: “WE HAVE A LOT TO DO TODAY!”
On a Saturday morning, the Randolph children wake up and sleepily make their way into the living room where their mother, Paula, opens the window shades, allowing light to fill up the room. Her husband, Vincent, who holds down two jobs and often works on Saturdays, has already left the house. Paula greets and kisses her children affectionately before announcing, “Don't everybody congregate in here. We have a lot to do today. I want to be out of here by 12 o'clock!,” alluding to the picnic scheduled for later that day. Paula starts opening the blinds in the bedrooms and, along with her children, begins cleaning. She periodically checks in with each of her three children (Stefan, 11; Michelle, 10; and Cynthia, 6) to gauge what has been accomplished.
Randolph Family: Saturday Morning
As Paula choreographs her children's household work activities, she also monitors their progress and holds them accountable for the final outcome. She keeps her children moving by checking on the tasks she enumerated for them (such as dusting and vacuuming) and having additional jobs ready. When Stefan confirms that he has finished dusting, she instructs him to take out the garbage. She calls out, “Who's gonna vacuum the den and my room?,” asking her children to take responsibility for another task. Cynthia, the youngest child, responds, “I AM,” displaying her enthusiastic cooperation. Paula's subsequent announcement about the time adds a sense of urgency regarding their need to finish so that they could make it to the picnic. While she might appear to be a taskmaster, Paula did take a few moments to appreciate one of her children's drawings, which she picked up while helping to straighten their room. She also joked around with her daughters about the pet hamster, and music played in the background as her children continued with their tasks. Paula and her children spent a few hours cleaning, dusting, and putting the house in order before going out to meet friends.
CLEAR EXPECTATIONS AND CONSISTENT MONITORING
We asked CELF children to tell us about the types of tasks they did at home to help their parents and siblings. A few children admitted with- out hesitation that they did not participate in household work. Linda, the eight year-old daughter in the Pollen family, quickly responded, “Nothing. I don't do anything around the house.” Some, like Mark, the nine-year-old son in the Moore family, even seemed surprised by the question: “I—never. Why do you think that? I never have to do chores.” In the Castillo family, in which the children helped out periodically, they joked that their mother called herself “the maid.”
Although most children in our study did mention occasionally taking on at least one task, such as cleaning their room and setting the table, none responded in the way that Stefan Randolph did: “We all clean our rooms, we dust, we have Swiffers we dust with, and you know, when we're done with that, we vacuum and we'll clean everything—the whole house on weekends—'cause it gets dusty and dirty.” Stefan's ten-year-old sister, Michelle, also referred to this activity: “We clean the house. And then, um, after that, we do something fun.” Their mother, Paula, often made her expectations explicit when she evaluated her children's work. After Stefan told her that he had completed dusting his room, she entered to conduct an inspection. She stopped at one piece of furniture and declared, “I see dust back there. Come on now you can't just du—you have to move stuff and get back in the corner. Okay?,” indicating that he had not been thorough enough. Later Paula walked into her daughters’ room and shouted, "Woo:-hoo:! A:lright! We're off to a good start. Looks grea::t!,” which was high praise considering her strict standards. Paula did not hesitate to critique her children's work; however, she was also quick to show enthusiasm when they carried out a task well. This type of careful monitoring was unusual among the parents in our study.
A team of researchers at CELF and iCELF examined a subset of the families in the CELF project along with families in Rome and found that parents in Rome placed more emphasis on the specificity and difficulty of tasks when engaging children in housework.35 Parents in Rome tended to monitor tasks more closely and recognized the need for a degree of expertise to successfully carry out certain tasks, as compared to the subset of Los Angeles parents. The Randolph family, however, was an exception that clearly stood out in the CELF study.
The children in the Randolph family often took on tasks on their own and recruited one another to help in household activities. One morning before school Cynthia observed as her older sister, Michelle, wrote down a list of objectives for the day. After summarizing their morning activities, Michelle asked, “What else did we accomplish?,” a question that oriented Cynthia to conceptualizing their time as goal-directed. Her subsequent question, “What do we have to do tonight?,” asked Cynthia to prioritize their evening activities. The siblings also socialized one another into new-tasks. One evening when Michelle and Stefan were rinsing their dinner dishes and putting them in the dishwasher, Stefan told Michelle that he thought Cynthia was now old enough to clear her own dishes. He then ordered Cynthia to clean off her plate and put it in the dishwasher and stood next to her as he apprenticed her to the task. As Cynthia scraped her plate into the trash, he told her, “Make sure to clean off all—all the rice,” then pointed out that there was still grease on the dish. Cynthia rinsed the dish and was about to leave it in the sink when Stefan instructed her to place it in the dishwasher. He then told her, “You're old enough to do that yourself. Okay? Put the juice away ‘cause you took it out.” Stefan then left the kitchen, and Cynthia returned the juice and other items to the refrigerator, cleared the table, and rinsed her glass and put it into the dishwasher. Stefan equated responsibility with age and positioned Cynthia as having reached a level of development at which she could competently carry out some of the tasks she saw her siblings perform every evening. As the CELF researchers Gonerko, Goodwin, and Tulbert note,36 Stefan's directives and care-taking displayed a style of overseeing tasks similar to that of his mother, who expected a thorough job and a high degree of accountability, whether the task be dusting, brushing teeth, or completing a homework assignment.
The Randolph family interactions reflected aspects of both the natural growth and the concerted cultivation approaches discussed by Lareau.37 Paula Randolph made use of bald imperatives, a no-nonsense tone of voice, followed up on her directives, and made clear what was appropriate and inappropriate behavior. She did not tolerate distractions when the children were told to take on a task. Paula also maintained a wide repertoire of diverse types of interactions with her children. She interspersed her commands with playful and highly attuned empathetic responses. She praised them when they did their job well and placed a high degree of importance on homework and children's household tasks. Despite the periodic use of what could be termed a “controlling” parenting style, deemed by Grolnick and her collaborators to inhibit a child's sense of independence and self-sufficiency,38 there was no evidence of any serious blunting of the creativity or development of the Randolph children, as many loving and engaging interactions occurred as the siblings played together. The development of hierarchical relationships in this family provided clear structures of authority; this is an approach that counters perspectives in some of the recent popular parenting books discussed above, as well as the work of psychological theorists who polarize “controlling” and “autonomy supporting” parenting. In fact, the mother in the Randolph family displays aspects of an authoritative, hierarchical parenting style while also supporting her children's autonomy as active, responsible members of the family.
CONCLUSION
A popular parenting book, Raising Our Children, Raising Ourselves, written by Naomi Aldort, a family counselor, encourages parents to allow their children free rein in the home. Aldort notes that children “occasionally feel empowered by helping in the home, but only when it is not required or expected.” “When a child offers help,” she advises, “express your gratitude and don't expect more.”39 In the CELF study, however, parents who appeared to take the child-centered approach described by Aldort or the “autonomy-supportive” perspective advocated by Grolnick and her colleagues,40 did not have much success at getting their children's attention or assistance. These perspectives also neglect the social, moral, and developmental value of children's contributions to the household. Jean I. Clarke, Connie Dawson, and David Bredehoft, in their book, How Much Is Enough? Everything You Need to Know to Steer Clear of Overindulgence and Raise Likeable, Responsible, and Respectful Children, insist that assigning chores to children beginning at a young age (three to four years old) instills responsibility, perseverance, and an awareness of the importance of contributing to the family.41 This type of socialization routine is illustrated in the Randolph family: the parents regularly assigned chores and held their children accountable for contributing to the household economy. At the same time, the resistance that children displayed in many families in our study is not necessarily a wholly negative phenomenon. As Aronsson and Cekaite demonstrate,42 the negotiations that ensue as a result of children's challenges end up calling into question prescribed family roles and responsibilities. These exchanges also involve children in creating activity contracts and in enacting their negotiated contributions. Parents may use these interactions as opportunities to engage children in social reasoning and moral accountability.
The psychologist G. R. Patterson argues that one of the major skills for effective parenting is the monitoring of a child's behavior.43 Goodwin and Tulbert and Goodwin examined parental monitoring of children's tasks in the CELF study and found that multiple modalities in these interactions contribute to the coordinated achievement of the activity: language and tone of voice, eye gaze, the alignment of family members’ bodies, and their shared orientation to relevant aspects of the material environment.44 When parents and children have shared understandings of family routines that are enacted and acknowledged on a consistent basis, they establish a framework for collaboration. At the same time, excessive monitoring can be counterproductive and ultimately backfire in children's socialization into responsibility. When children display competence in a task and their participation no longer requires guidance and reinforcement, ongoing monitoring may not be necessary. In a few CELF families in which children's participation in household tasks was on the high end, children carried out some tasks on their own, without parental initiation.45
Everyday family interactions serve as a central context for children's socialization. The analyses of the physical and spatial organization of parent-child exchanges have revealed insights into how family members succeed or fail to establish mutual attention and develop understanding of household routines. In addition, in interactions about household work most children displayed resistance to parents’ directives to engage in household tasks and often required reasons for their participation. The justifications that parents provided served to socialize their children into economic and moral understandings of what it means to be a member of a family. Children have grown increasingly dependent on their parents to maintain the household, and parents now bear the burden of these responsibilities. Children's involvement in domestic activities offers necessary training for becoming a self-reliant adult and may be consequential for the way children develop and contribute to their families and communities.
Parenting ideologies and practices, along with children's local social and physical environments, mediate children's socialization and constitute a developmental niche for understanding how culture organizes children's lives.46 Returning to Ochs and Izquierdo's analysis of children's socialization into responsibility in three cultures, child-rearing practices among Samoans and the Matsigenka include the cultivation of attention to surrounding persons and activities and enacting consistent expectations that result in the habituation of tasks performed by children. In these cultures as well as in the Mayan community studied by de León, such practices lead to children's self-reliance, increased competence in domestic skills, and engaged, respectful orientations to others. Among the CELF families, the competing demands of work outside the home and children's schooling, academic, and extracurricular activities present a challenge to establishing consistent socialization routines in the home. Yet investing time and energy in engaging and sustaining children's involvement in household work both cognitively and corporeally orients children to helping others, which benefits children's moral development and contributes to family well-being.
NOTES
1. Bolin 2006; Ochs and Izquierdo 2009; Whiting and Whiting 1975.
2. Zelizer 1994.
3. Mintz and Kellogg 1988; Stearns 2003.
4. Zelizer 1994.
5. As Ariès (1962) notes, in Europe the institution of childhood emerged earlier among the elite, who organized an extended formal stage of education for their children, but this practice did not permeate all strata of society until the late nineteenth to early twentieth century.
6. Hofferth and Sandberg 2001b.
7. Kremer-Sadlik, Izquierdo, and Fatigante 2010; Kremer-Sadlik and Gutiérrez, this volume; Lareau 2003.
8. Coltrane 2000; Stearns 2003.
9. E.g., Levine 2008.
10. Klein, Graesch, and Izquierdo 2009.
11. Aronsson and Cekaite 2011.
12. Osit 2008.
13. Cheal 2003; Bianchi, Robinson, and Milkie 2006.
14. See Goodwin and Goodwin, this volume.
15. Goodnow 1988.
16. Antill et al. 1996; Blair 1992b.
17. Blair 1992a.
18. Lareau 2003.
19. Kusserow 2004.
20. See Wingard 2007 for a discussion of parents’ prioritization of their children's activities.
21. Patterson 1982.
22. Goodwin 2006, 538.
23. Aronsson and Cekaite 2011.
24. Fasulo, Loyd, and Padiglione 2007.
25. Ochs and Izquierdo 2009.
26. de León 2011.
27. Goodwin 2006.
28. See Kendon 1990.
29. Goodwin 2006, 538.
30. Pigeron 2008.
31. Tulbert and Goodwin 2011.
32. Ochs and Izquierdo 2009.
33. Bolin 2006.
34. King 1999.
35. Fasulo, Loyd, and Padiglione 2007.
36. Gonerko, Goodwin, and Tulbert 2008.
37. Lareau 2003.
38. Grolnick et al. 2007.
39. Aldort 2006, 208-9.
40. Grolnick et al. 2007.
41. Clarke, Dawson, and Bredehoft 2004.
42. Aronsson and Cekaite 2011.
43. Patterson 1982.
44. Goodwin 2006; Tulbert and Goodwin 2011.
45. Klein, Graesch, and Izquierdo 2009.
46. Super and Harkness 1986.