Last night my 13-year-old son accused me of having him just so I'd have someone around the house to do chores.
Ha! If only. True I was asking him to haul out some heavy trash bags to the garage. And lately I've been delegating a lot of the heavy lifting I used to do (like carrying the 20-pound bags of dog food) myself. He may be only 13 but at 5-foot-9 and 150 pounds, he's now stronger than me.
Yesterday the Wall Street Journal wrote about an upcoming study from the University of Maryland that has tracked the amount of chores that kids now do at home. Not surprisingly, it's down by 12 percent since 1997 (and there's been a 25 percent decline since 1981).
Children on average are spending a mere 24 minutes a day doing cleaning, laundry and other housework.
Housework by adults in general is way down, too, but the authors of the study noted the drop in participation by kids has long-lasting effects in their lives.
Pitching in at home can affect the health of marriages later on, particularly among men. U.S. marriages tend to be more stable when men participate more in domestic tasks, according to a study published in the American Journal of Sociology.
Housework also can instill a habit of serving others.
Among my three kids, my middle child seems to be the most cooperative and helpful when it comes to chores. Sure, they're all asked to pitch in, and at least the girls will do their own laundry once in a while. But my middle one is the kid who often picks up the slack of others.
One mistake I unconsciously made was that I had been assigning chores based on the traditional views on gender. My son got trash duty, my girls kitchen and laundry duty. Now I try to mix it up.
I've never measured by the minute how much they put into chores each day, but I doubt it even adds up to 24 minutes for each of them.
How much do your kids chip in? And what incentives (if any) do you have to keep them at it?
Posted
Aug 28 2008, 01:01 PM
by
Virginia Linn