Our daughter Jules is five now and lately I’ve been wondering, Should she be cleaning up after herself? Always? Sometimes? A little here and there? At some point should she be helping out around the house on a regular basis? What I do know is that I hate the word “chores” and will never use it with my kids. Because while on the one hand it does simply mean a “minor task” what it’s most famous for is its alternative definition: “unpleasant or burdensome task.” Can you imagine:

“Honey! Right now I’d like you to go do your unpleasant, burdensome tasks. Thanks!”

“Great Mom! Thanks for the reminder. I’ll get right on that.”

And so I bring you this post, which is essentially me mulling over this issue of when, how and if we should include our children in the responsibilities of maintaining a tidy home.

WARNING: THIS POST MEANDERS.

When I was two, a 35-year old woman named Esperanza, whom we called Espy, came to live with us as our nanny/housekeeper. We weren’t rich, but as I understand it, back in the early seventies live-in help was fairly inexpensive—at least in Southern California. (Just fyi, Espy became a citizen and has a decent pension, become a seasoned world traveller,  has a car and a savings account.)

Espy was a courageous woman. At the age of 15, against her family’s wishes, she left her home to become a nun.  Twenty years later she left the convent and El Salvador, to come to America to find a better life. She somehow found her way to our home where she lived for the next 16 years. I loved Espy. But I was also afraid of her.

Now I don’t really know anything about life in a convent (and what I do comes from watching The Sound of Music), but my educated guess is that everything is neat. And orderly. And that cleanliness is next to Godliness. What I do know is that Espy liked things clean, clean, clean and this made my Dad very happy. If there was a red wine stain in the beige carpet, Espy could get it out. Dirt and messes were her enemies and she was a formidable foe.

At some point in my life, the responsibility of cleaning my room was transferred from her on over to me. I don’t remember how old I was when this transfer happened or how I learned of it.  Maybe I  was five?  or six?  or seven? Ten? And maybe someone told me it had to be clean once a week on a certain day at a certain time. I’m not sure! But what I did know was that it  was my job to put my things away in my room. And I can certainly understand my parents seeing this as a perfectly reasonable expectation. The unfortunate part was how this new edict was enforced.

Espy would come upstairs—just the sound of her footsteps made my heart beat faster—and come into my mess of a room. Then, without saying a word, she’d  proceed to pick up every piece of clothing, every toy and book and whatever else was strewn about and toss it into a pile in the middle of the floor until it looked like a mini volcano. Then when she was good and done, she’d sit on my bed, cross her arms—her short legs just dangling—and silently watch me take every piece off the pile and put it away—properly.

That is to say, I am intimately acquainted with how this kid feels:

It wasn’t a family secret that I was a bit of a slob. Trying to be of some help to me, I remember my Grandma Ruth would say, “You know, it takes just as long to drop something on the floor as it does to hang it up.” And while I got the point she was making, I also knew it wasn’t true!  It only takes one second to drop a dress on the floor and at least ten to walk over to the closet and grab a hanger and put the dress on it and hang it up. But I also knew that if I took those extra ten seconds to do that, my room wouldn’t become a mess. What’s interesting is that as I was taking off my clothes, I’d often think about what my Grandma had said and marvel at how it was not quite a strong enough argument to get me to walk over to the closet. I LIKED just dropping my clothes on the floor. That is, of course, until Espy came up and sat on that bed!

So, how neat am I today?

My closet and my car are total messes.

“Why are all of your clothes on the floor and on your dresser mom?” Jules has asked me more than once. She’s well aware of the fact that my closet is messy and John’s is neat, that my car is messy and John’s is neat. On the rare occasion that my car is actually clean, she’ll marvel, “Wow Mom. Looks good.” Then she sees that things degenerate quickly which leaves me stuck wondering: How can I really expect my kids to ever put their things aways when they have me as a role model?

So the question is: Should I at some point ask the kids to participate in the clean up? And if so, to clean what? And do we have to be consistent about it? And do we pay her for it, like we pay Karla?

I don’t want to deprive my kids of the self satisfaction that comes from self care and doing a job right. And of learning to do things with and from her mom. I remember that when I was a teenager, I was at a friends house when her mom pulled a load of laundry out of the machine. It was clear that my friend was expected to help and so we all sat down on the living room floor to fold.  I felt very self-conscious, unsure of my abilities.  Very carefully, I grabbed a shirt and tried to fold it perfectly—just like Espy did.  By the time I was done, they’d folded everything.

“You’ve never folded a load of laundry before, have you ?” her mom asked.

“No,” I said embarrassed.

To me, it seemed so nice  that my friend was on the floor with her mom folding their laundry—doing some household project together. That’s not an experience I’d ever had with my mom. But I don’t know how my friend really felt. Now that I think about it, I’m curious…

PAUSE

Okay! I just facebooked her about it. I’ll report back.

In the meantime, I want to make clear that it’s not that Jules never cleans up. She does do it, but only when she wants to. One day she yelled, “Mommy! Come! Come!”

I ran into her room and she had the biggest grin on her face. She’d made her bed. By herself. For the first time, “I did it!”

Another day, “Mommy, Mommy!”

I came into the kitchen to find her at her and Hudson’s little table. It had a table cloth. Folded cloth napkins. Plates. Silverware. She was beaming!

She knows neat. She knows “fancy.” She knows how to put things away. But it’s all based on her own inspiration. She only does stuff when she’s inspired. Rhe he other day I took a bucket of warm soap and a scrub brush onto the deck to attack the berry-stained bainster and my kids were desperate to help. Screaming for their own brushes! They scrubbed for almost an hour.

Right now I don’t mind that she doesn’t clean up after herself, but I just worry about the fact that I don’t mind!

But it’s different for my friend Tamara. She really wants her 6 -year-old daughter Emma to pick up after herself. It’s driving her crazy:

“It’s just hard when they throw their stuff on the ground and won’t pick it up.  I am thinking, what’s wrong with you, why do you do that?!”

I emailed her back a list of questions:

1. Are you neat?
2. Do you always pick up after yourself?
3. Have you always been that way?
4. What did your parents expect of you in this regard and how did they express it?

I think before any parent goes ahead and starts assigning chores or expects toys to be put away or a bed made, they need to first take a long hard look at themselves. What do they do? Do they make their beds everyday? And most importantly how did they come to be that way.

Then I sent Tamara some quotes from people whose thinking on raising children I admire to give her the food for thought that I’ve been chewing on. First I sent a long quote from A. S. Neill’s book Summerhill, A Radical Approach to Childrearing. Neill founded a unique (to say the last) school called  Summerhill,  in England in 1921. At Summerhil children were free to be themselves. From wikipedia:

Summerhill is noted for its philosophy that children learn best with freedom from coercion. All lessons are optional, and pupils are free to choose what to do with their time. Neill founded Summerhill with the belief that “the function of a child is to live his own life — not the life that his anxious parents think he should live, not a life according to the purpose of an educator who thinks he knows best.”

So I sent Tamara something  Neill had written in 1960:

“Too often parents attach far too much importance to tidiness…Normal children shed their clothes anywhere and everywhere, discarding a sweater and forgetting where it was left….

The average child dimly realizes that he is fed and clothed by his parents without any effort on his part. He feels that such care is his natural right, but he realizes that on the other hand he is expected and obliged to do a hundred menial tasks and many disagreeable chores, which the parents themselves evade….

In Summerhill, we used to have a community law that provided that every child over 12 and every member of the staff must do two hours of work each week on the grounds. The pay was a token pay of a nickel and hour. If you did not work, you were fined a dime. A few, teachers included, were content to pay the fines. Of those who worked, most had their eyes on the clock because there was no play component in the work, and therefore the work bored everyone. The law was re-examined, and the children abolished it by an almost unanimous vote.

A few years ago, we needed an infirmary. We decided to build one ourselves—a proper building of brick and cement. None of us had ever laid a brick, but we started in. A few pupils helped to dig the foundations and knocked down some old walls to get bricks. But the children demanded payment. We refused. In the end, the infirmary was built by the teachers and visitors. The job was just too dull for children, and to their young minds the need for an infirmary was too remote. They had no self-interest in it. But some time later when they wanted a bicycle shed, they built one all by themselves without any help from the staff.

I am writing of children—not as we adults think they should be—but as they really are. Their community sense—their sense of social responsibility—does not develop until the age of 18 or more. Their interests are immediate and the future does not exist for them.

I have never yet seen a lazy child. What is called laziness is either lack of interest or a lack of health. A healthy child cannot be idle, he has to be doing something all day long.

I find it impossible to get youths of seventeen to help me plant potatoes or weed onions, although the same boys will spend hours souping up motor engines or washing cars…It took me a long time to accept this phenomenon. The truth began to dawn on me one day when I was digging my brother’s garden. I didn’t enjoy the job, and it came to me suddlenly that what was wrong was that I was digging a garden that meant nothing to me. And my garden means nothing to the boys, whereas their bikes or radion mean a lot to them. True altruism is a long time in coming, and it never loses its fact of selfishness….

Then I googled my hero Alfie Kohn for his take on the subject of “chores” and found, without surprise, that he’s totally against rewarding children for helping around the house.  The way they handle it in his family is through family meetings. (Unfortunately, he does use the dreaded word!)

The goal in raising children is to nurture their inherent tendency to cooperate, rather than expect compliance through forms of control involving rewards or punishments. In order to foster a sense of cooperation, I recommend regular family meetings in which you decide as a family what chores need to be done and who will do them. If you include your son in the decision-making process, he will be much more likely to cooperate and willingly do his part. Together, you can make a detailed list of all the household chores to be done and let your son choose which ones he wants to do. He may want to do different jobs from time to time, and you can work this out as a family….

I have never paid my children or rewarded them in any other way for doing chores. They began helping regularly when they were about four years old, and continued helping through their teenage years until they left home. When they forgot to do the chores that they agreed to do, I simply brought it up at the next family meeting, and we discussed ways to help them remember. Sometimes they wanted to switch to other jobs. We found that job charts were useful in helping everyone remember what their jobs were….

My recommendation, therefore, is to keep the allowance totally separate from the chores. That way, your son will learn the value of cooperation, and will feel that he is helping to contribute his share to the family. Through family meetings he will learn how a truly democratic decision-making process works.

Then I went back to A. S. Neill:

A school should make a child’s life a game. I do not mean that the child should have a path of roses. Making it all easy for the child is fatal to the child’s character. But life itself presents so many difficulties that the artificially made difficulties which we present to children are unnecessary.

I believe to impose anything by authority is wrong. The child should not do anything until he comes to the opinion—his opinion—that it should be done. The curse of humanity is the external compulsion, whether it comes from the Pope or the state or the teacher or the parent. It is facism in toto.

So my biggest take away from these passages is that our family could benefit from FAMILY MEETINGS. Actually, I think it’s something I think our kids would like. Yes, Hudson at three may be too young, but he can sit in. I’ll let you know how it goes. Likely, as per Neill, I’ll start just by discussing the issue of cleaning up and gathering Jules thoughts on it.

I’d like to add a final Neill quote that really resonates with me:

The reason we here in Summerhill keep getting such good reports about the industrious performance of our old pupils on responsible jobs is that these boys and girls have lived our their self-centered fantasy stage in Summerhill. As young adults they are able to face the realities of life without any unconscious longing for the play of childhood.

And finally (yes there’s more!) I turned to Dr. Laura Markham who wrote a helpful piece called You’re Not the Boss of Me:

“…giving orders nonstop, or in a negative tone, or without taking the other person’s perspective into account, actually triggers “contrary” behavior.  Think about it.  If you worked with a boss who gave you hundreds of negative orders daily, would you “want” to cooperate?

But even respectful, positive parents run up against children who don’t feel like cooperating because they’re experimenting with their sense of agency.  To grow into capable, responsible people, kids need the experience of being able to impact their world.  We often think of this need as being about achievement, but it could also be understood as being in charge of oneself.  And although we as parents often forget this, all humans, even small ones, are ultimately separate people, who need to protect the integrity of their own “selves.”  That’s why they’re so fiercely committed to”You’re not the boss of me!” and ”Do it myself!”

She had a bunch of recommendations. Here’s the most relevant:

7. Ask questions that give your child the  appropriate responsibility.

“Brush your teeth.” becomes “What do you need to do before you leave for school?”

8. Respect your child’s right to refuse sometimes.

“Empty the dishwasher.” becomes ”I need your help–Would you empty the dishwasher please?”

Maybe he’s studying for a test or only has five minutes to finish building his castle before bath time. If he routinely helps out and has a pleasant attitude about it, why isn’t it ok for him to ask for special dispensation tonight?  You would offer that to your spouse, right? Of course, if it isn’t negotiable for whatever reason, you wouldn’t phrase this as a request.

GOOD NEWS!

My childhood friend facebooked me back re: doing laundry with her mom. That time with her mom wasn’t the close family time of my fantasy. Nonetheless, it’s a dream of a response filled with insightful self-reflection by a really thoughtful mom:

Laundry is a subject I visit in my head often. I have issues about laundry and my childhood. I guess laundry is the most symbolic thing I have to sum up my up bringing. For as long as I can remember I was responsible for my own laundry. This meant I often had no clean clothes and I don’t remember ever having a set place like an underwear drawer let alone clean underwear to put there.

My kids have it very different. They have a mother who shows her love not by sitting on the floor and playing with them but by doing their laundry. I buy my detergent at the vacuums store, It’s Europe, and then hang the clothes in the sun to dry so they are crisp and smell like hard work and love. I’m not kidding. Today Phoebe helped me because it was fun but I never ask for help or make it a chore.

I’m sure my mom had really good reasons for teaching me to be very self sufficient. There are lots of great qualities about myself I can directly attribute to that but I still envy the kids who had homemaker moms. Actually it’s the moms I envied. and now as a mother I get to be the mom who for the most part enjoys their job.

Now that my daughter is 8 I am starting to worry that maybe I need to be less resistant and start to teach my daughter some responsibility. I want her to take care of her things and learn to help out…

Same quandry!

I’m gonna start with a family meeting.

You?

Filed under: Uncategorized by Jennifer on 08/24/2011