Why our young people benefit from household responsibilities

Why our young people benefit from household responsibilities  

With us all currently sheltering at home the number of household tasks has naturally increased.  Sometimes it can feel like you have literally just tidied something up when it needs to be tidied up again.  This can be incredibly frustrating especially if you are the one who is typically picking everything up. 

So, what is the best course of action when the next person leaves wet towels on the bathroom floor or the bin bag starts to overflow and nobody else seems to notice! 

It turns out that chores or household responsibilities are incredibly important in terms of the role they play in development.  Dr Marty Rossmann from the University of Minnesota spent 30 years studying the same group of children and her research clearly shows that involving children in household tasks from an early age can have a positive impact later in life.  This is largely because the responsibility of unloading the dishwasher on a regular basis introduces a sense of responsibility, competence, self-reliance and self-worth.  So, next time you are considering the question “is it worth the hassle” try and remember that you are actually giving your young person an important opportunity to develop life skills. 

Additional research goes on to suggest that engagement in household activities will essentially make our children happier as adults.  A longitudinal study conducted at Harvard University, The Harvard Grant study,  suggested that a willingness and capacity to work in childhood (chores at home/part time job) was a particularly good predictor of success both professionally and personally.  And this intuitively makes sense.  When our children are guided to make helpful contributions to their environment this will not only improve their social acceptability and empathy but it will also provide an opportunity to be part of something bigger than themselves, contributing to be both meaning and belonging.  

So, how we get our children and teenagers to engage more in this process.  We are all familiar with the wide array of excuses our young people use when confronted with the boring task of taking the rubbish out or emptying the dish washer “I have too much homework”, “I have to meet my friends” “I’m in the middle of my favourite programme” and as tempting as it is to let it slide you will be doing your young person a much bigger favour by following through. 

Dr Christine Carter, a sociologist from UC Berkeley has a number of really helpful suggestions: 

See if there is a way that we can make the jobs more fun so that it actually feels more like play.  One of the things we do in our house is we turn the music up really loud and see how fast we can get the task completed.  I even do this when I am doing the chores alone because even as adults, the more fun we can make it the less like work it seems.  

Make the task more challenging.  Young people often complain because the job is boring and we know from brain science that our brains get much more interested in things if there is something new to focus on.  So maybe use a timer or introduce a new element - if children are normally only allowed cut the vegetables for dinner perhaps with supervision, they could also have the responsibility of cooking them on the hob.

Think about autonomy, nobody, children or adults like being told what to do and when to do it  - so try and use some choice around when the task needs to be completed by or maybe give them a list of what needs to be completed but allow them to choose what they do first.  

As parents our job is to hold reasonable boundaries in a calm empathetic and predictable way. Most teenagers will occasionally (or regularly) resist doing jobs at home and as frustrating as this is we need to remember that it is the job of teenagers to resist.  However, like adults’ teenagers need to feel needed and although it might not always feel like this, holding them to their agreed household responsibilities gives them a sense of being needed and belonging to the team. 

  

What we need to carefully consider is our approach – if you (like we all do sometimes) get angry and start talking about their lack of contribution you are likely to be met with more resistance because you have activated their threat response.  If you are able to take a moment to calm down (incredibly difficult I know!) and think with your teen about what is getting in the way of them completing their chores and what their plan is in terms of moving forward we can hopefully hold our teenager to account without it becoming a battle of wills.  

Finally, it is generally agreed by the experts in this field that it is not helpful to pay our young people for chores because we are then paying them to contribute to their own team and by virtue of this, we are supporting them to internalise that they are motivated by money.   However, whether or not you pay your children or teens or you provide them with pocket money that is not linked to household responsibilities it’s important to support them in using their money well.  There is a lovely model that supports young people to split their money into three lots:

One for saving 

One for spending 

One for sharing 

The quantities don’t have to be equal, maybe just 10% can be put in the sharing jar.  The value of instilling our young people with kindness (see above post) will far outweigh this 10%. 

Remember it is not only what you do for your children but also the things that you have allowed them to do for themselves that will contribute to their successful transition into an independent adult. 

Dr Tamara Scully is a Chartered Clinical Psychologist based in the UK.  Tamara runs Castle Psychology (www.castlepsychology.co.uk)  and is passionate about promoting wellbeing and resilience in children, young people and their families