Teaching Kids’ to Do Chores: a Perspective From a Home-Based Parent
I finally figured out a job title I can live with: Home-Based Parent. “Stay-at-Home-Mom” isn’t remotely accurate (my record: five trips into town on a weekday) and “Domestic Engineer” sounds like I’m trying too hard to avoid the fact I don’t have a regular income (do earnings from the consignment shop count?). But Home-Based Parent is totally on-target. It applies to both dads and moms, and includes the increasingly common possibility of a home-based business. Feel free to use this description if it suits what you do.
Being a Home-Based Parent has its perks (flexibility, increased presence for the kiddos, and no childcare bills) but also its disadvantages: social stigma, decreased household income, and kids who do fewer chores. This last item is where I struggle and maybe you do, too.
Take the laundry, for example. My kids, ages 13 and 12, are perfectly capable of doing laundry. (Folding it they are not; the clean clothes are tossed into an ever-growing melee in the middle of their bedroom floors…) And by successive approximations, I’m heading toward laundry mastery with them. We are on the “put your dirty clothes in the washer” step. Admittedly, we’ve been on this step for months now because it’s just easier for me, the Home-Based Parent, to do the laundry while the kids are at school or completing home-based (!) learning.
The difference between adolescent girls and boys: my daughter’s laundry is on the left and my son’s on the right. Imagine the state of her bedroom.
But at what cost? My kids aren’t mastering an important life skill (among others) and this failure on my part makes the kids ever more dependent on me for fresh clothes (although I don’t think my middle child cares, as he would wear the same smelly t-shirt to school five days a week…) and ever more resistant to learning how to do laundry. And why would they want to? Mom does it for them. The vicious cycle is in fine working order. And it needs broken because despite his endearing nature, I don’t want our version (times three) of a 35-year-old Crosby from Parenthood bringing home his laundry every Saturday morning.
I look back on my upbringing. Both of my parents worked outside the home, and I was a latch-key kid from an early age. And I had chores. For example, cleaning cupboards (my fav). Starting supper (ugh). Folding the laundry (for real, not just moving the heap into my room) and, yes, washing and drying it. I learned these skills and finished them while still doing homework, music practice and eating all the marshmallows and cough drops in the house (but that’s another story). I had tons of responsibilities, or at least it felt like it. And it helped my non-home-based family out. They were motivated to teach me life skills because they didn’t have time to get that work done themselves. And you know what? Their efforts paid off. Because kids who learn life skills are on track for life success. And not just when they are part of the work force, but in college as well. My husband and I know a serious handful of kids who could handle the academic rigor of higher education but who failed coed life because they couldn’t care for themselves, temptations of the party life aside. I wasn’t one of those kids. And neither was my husband. Because both of us learned to care for ourselves before we left home.
Now that I’m a parent, but home-based, that flexibility of time I mentioned earlier is a blessing and but also a curse. I can be that present parent but also that enabling parent. It would be easier for me to just complete the housework myself. And I’m guessing my budding teens think the same thing, as Mom has all the time in the world, being home all day long. In a way, our reasoning makes sense but it doesn’t make good sense. Functioning adults know how to care for themselves and it’s my job to raise my kids to become capable, well-adjusted adults. So I am learning how to use my flexibility as Home-Based Parent to teach my kids life skills. It’s hard. It’s frustrating; even the most patient parent would want to throw in the dishtowel. And it’s certainly time-consuming. But anything that disrupts the normal routine is worth that time.
And teaching life skills to my kids is no exception.
Check out these age-appropriate chore lists from latitudes.org:
