Fewer than half of UK children are doing any chores in their homes, according to a new study based on responses from almost 6,000 UK parents of children aged four to 18.
Cue parenting experts lining up to tell us how bad a thing this is. And look, I know that they’re right. Giving your children jobs to do around the home is obviously important. It teaches them responsibility, it makes them understand the importance of contributing to the society in which they live, it creates a more equal eco-system within the home.
And yet, despite all of those things being entirely true, I still have enormous sympathy with the 56 percent of parents who don’t make their children do chores.
Why? Because – and I say this as a loving parent and pro-child person – kids are generally really terrible at helping around the house.
Before I had children (traditionally the part of your life where you are best at parenting) I had extremely high hopes for how I’d introduce chores. “You just have to make sure they get used to helping from a really early age,” I’d say, child-free and well rested. “Children who are educated in the Montessori style can cut vegetables by the time they’re two!”
I wasn’t wrong, per se. Those videos you see online of children peeling carrots and clearing the dishwasher aren’t faked. Some children can do things like that; the children with the unbelievably patient parents. But as I discovered when I started trying to teach my child to do those things, it requires a depth of emotional resilience that I just do not have. If you want to have your child clear the dishwasher perfectly, you firstly have to spend weeks teaching them, standing over them, helping them.
Or you have to accept that they’re going to break things, and then you have to (in order to get a gold star in good parenting) let them help you with the clear up. In my head my toddler would cheerfully put the cutlery away while I kneaded the dough for our freshly baked bread. In reality she threw things on the floor, and I bit my tongue while trying to calmly explain that wasn’t how we do things and inwardly wondered about what my child-free friends were doing with their Saturday mornings.
Other chores have been similarly successful. Washing up involves tipping half a bottle of fairy liquid into the sink while I whimper “that was £4.99, darling”, then soaking the floor, counters, walls and everyone’s clothing.
Best of all, my child has an aversion to anything hotter than lukewarm water, so the dirty pots and pans came out lightly coated in a sticky film of soapy olive oil residue.
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I’ve made concerted attempts at cooking with my toddler because I love it and she does too… to an extent. But I don’t know where other parents get their reserves of coolness when they’re cooking together.
I don’t have the ability to relax about too much salt being thrown into a bolognese or egg shells landing in cake batter. Even things that really don’t matter, like decorating a cake, are impossible for me to let go of. I want it to look nice, and those tiny little hands just don’t have the fine motor skills for a piping bag yet.
One of the cruel realities of being human is that in order to do something well, you almost certainly have to do it badly first, but as an impatient perfectionist with a short attention span I’m just not in a position to enable that journey.
At this point the only concession I’ve made to raising a chore-aware child comes from a tip a friend of mine gave: to make sure that all housework undertaken by parents is done during the children’s waking hours, so they don’t unwittingly absorb the message that the house cleans itself during nap time.
Making them help is probably much better parenting, but making sure they observe you doing chores during their waking hours does at least enable them to comprehend that these things need to be done. And it leaves any childfree hours for you to do something more enjoyable than mopping floors.
I’m sure that eventually we’d have got to a lovely, impressive stage where my three year old could help around the house, if I were patient about it. But I’m not. I’m controlling, easily annoyed, and I want my house to be passably clean in the minimum possible time so that I can get on with doing better, more important things.
I should try. I know I should. But I don’t. Remind me, when I write a column in 2035 about the fact that my children won’t help around the house, that it’s a problem entirely of my own creation.
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