One of our kids arrived at hockey missing a key piece of equipment so many times that he had to sit and watch practice three times in a row—and the fourth time, I got an email from the coach. “Where,” he asked, “is [child]?” “Well,” I replied, “I dropped him off . . .” After a few minutes of mild worry (we live in a small town, and that child knows everyone at the rink), the coach emailed again. The child had been found hiding in the bathroom, too embarrassed to admit to having to sit out practice once again. Consequences provided, with no help from me.
But with most household chores, the “natural consequences” bother us more than they do our children. They’re blind to overflowing trash and dishes in the sink. If they cared about a clean room, they’d have cleaned it. Which means that if we want to use consequences as motivation, we have to come up with something they care about—and we have to ensure that it’s not an empty threat.
What might that consequence be? The loss of screen time is the most popular (with children who have their own devices, suggests Ron Lieber, the Wi-Fi password might change). Maybe you won’t drive a child to practice until the chickens are in or the dog is fed. Suddenly, the coach who requires laps if anyone is late is in charge of your consequences, which is a beautiful thing. Choose something that matters to your child, and take it away.
LET KIDS PICK THEIR CHORES
When our kids were younger, we rotated chores, because even if you’d actually prefer to feed the chickens, it is not fair if you’re the only one who does it. But especially with older kids, it’s possible that they’ll just agree—one would rather wash the dishes, the other would rather clear the table and wipe the counters. “We sat down with a huge list of things that get done around the house and I let them pick things they disliked the least, explaining that this is how my husband and I originally divvied up the work—I do the cooking because I don’t really mind it. He does the dishes because I really hate that,” says Karen Smith from Glen Ellyn, Illinois, of her two kids.
“Speaking as someone who did a lot of chores as a kid,” says Melody Schreiber, a mother in Washington, DC, “I would listen to the kids about which chores they despise and which ones they enjoy. I hate dishes but love vacuuming and laundry, so my mom played that up. And if I wanted to complain, she reminded me that I chose them.”
The most popular area of choice is dinner—kids who cook (and even a nine- or ten-year-old should be able to cook a simple meal—watch MasterChef Junior if you don’t believe me) can also choose. “I recently started asking my kids to each make dinner one night a week,” says New Jersey mother Aileen Carroll. Her seventeen-year-old and two sixteen-year-olds each sign up for a night weekly, and she makes sure that they have a plan so that items are defrosted or ingredients are on hand. “It works surprisingly well and no more complaints about the menu!”
IT’S NEVER TOO LATE TO START
Maybe you just never established a chore routine at your house—first the kids were too young, then you were too busy—and now they’re however old (five, eight, fifteen) and you’re wishing you’d made this happen. As with anything, you can’t start any younger. But it’s really not too late. One strategy, suggested by Dr. Gilboa, is to address the entire question of whether you treat your children with the respect due to their age and ability together. Most kids, she points out, “are so annoyed with you that you don’t understand how grown-up they are, and you treat them like a baby.”
So talk to them, she said. Tell them—and I mean this sincerely, not with a trace of irony—that you haven’t done right by them. There are privileges they feel old enough for, and there are responsibilities they are old enough for, and they can earn the privileges by stepping up to the responsibilities. Say, “I’m going to teach you to do the laundry, and once you can do it, we’ll start the clock, and after you’ve shown me that you can handle that for a month, you can take the bus to the mall alone,” or whatever you’re willing to let them do.
“Grown-up privileges are tied to grown-up responsibilities,” she says. “That’s the way life works, and it’s the way you should work.”
START WHEN LIFE CHANGES
Many parents who have been at-home caregivers go back to work when their children reach a certain age. Make that a moment to bring about the chore transition. You’re going to need more help, and that’s not an occasion for guilt, but rather an opportunity. Other life changes can present the same need, whether it’s long term and ongoing like a partner who deploys for the military or a decision to bring another child into the family, or it’s a temporary measure because of family need, a death or divorce, a job loss, a move, or the purchase of a family business.
Some of those circumstances are obviously not things you’d choose (to say the least), but addressing the physical challenges they’re going to present for your family as well as the emotional ones directly can give everyone something different to hold on to (and even something different to be upset about). Change can be very hard, but change can also allow children and families to grow.
LET THEM WHINE
Once they’re past that “helpful” stage, most children really don’t want to do anything that could be described as a chore. (Sadly, this usually coincides with their becoming able to actually help.) Or maybe they do like some chores, but they don’t want to do them when you need them done. And any child with siblings is going to know, for certain-sure and with all her heart and soul, that she does more than they do, and she’s going to say so.
That’s okay. In this case if you see something, don’t always say something becomes if you hear something, pretend you didn’t. It’s so easy to let the griping get to you. Really? Really they’re complaining about feeding the dog when you just worked a full day and made dinner and you’ve got laundry to do and a full list of other stuff before bed? Worse, whining over chores can really hit us where we live. Who but a totally entitled, spoiled child would put on this kind of production over clearing the table?
More than anything else, the complaining over simple chores can make us doubt our entire parenting strategy. We hate “making them do chores” as a piece of discipline in part because their reaction makes us feel terrible on so many levels. We hate that they’re unhappy, we hate that our asking them to help us out would make them unhappy, and we hate the whole process of feeling our own emotions while dragging them through their resistance.
But it’s deeply ironic that we often choose to skip the whole thing (thus increasing the odds that we really are raising a spoiled and entitled child who can’t do anything for herself) instead of just skipping something simpler: our reaction.
So what if they complain? So what if they don’t want to do it? You probably don’t want to do it, either; you’ve just learned that complaining only makes it worse. They’ll learn that, too, eventually. Meanwhile, let it go when you can, for the sake of your own happiness.
A few other simple pieces of advice:
Lower your standards. Not, perhaps, with respect to clean dishes—but there really are multiple ways to successfully load a dishwasher.
Simplify the chore. “I gave my three daughters their own laundry duty as early as possible,” says Dana Laquidara, a mother of three now-adult children in Upton, Massachusetts. “I taught them to wash the whole load in cold when their hamper (which doubled as a laundry basket) was full. No sorting required.”
Keep a few good lines in your pocket. It helps to have a few go-to things to say when you’d rather shout, “Just shut up and do it!” Here are some ideas: “We do chores ‘CQC’—cheerfully, quickly, and completely,” says Laura Hudgens. “When they’re whining, I ask them if they really think they have that horrible of a situation or if they thought that maybe it wasn’t that bad, and then get back to me,” says Judi Fusco Kledzik, who lives with her husband and three kids in California. “I try to take the path of commiseration,” says Rebecca Wadsworth Blythe, also from California, adding, “‘ I know! I hate laundry,
too! Just imagine how horrible it would be if one person had to [gasp] fold and put away laundry for the whole family!’” Just imagine.
Teach them how to remember. Kledzik teaches her three daughters to use the same tools she uses: notes, phone reminders, setting something right by the door the night before so it won’t be forgotten in the morning.
Have someone else teach them. “As a young widow trying to run a business and raise two kids, I quickly discovered I lacked the attention, patience, and perseverance to get them to do their chores. My solution was to hire an after-school nanny. He was that impartial third party who could teach them how to do laundry, wash dishes, vacuum, and apply the implacable follow-through they needed. He saved my sanity and allowed me to enjoy the kids when we were together,” says Joy Imboden Overstreet. Now a grandmother who lives in Oregon, she says, “when I visit my busy daughter, I am the one who rides herd on her kids.”
Settle in for the Long Haul (Or, What Happened at Our House)
It’s still a struggle to get the chores done at our house—but it’s a struggle that we’re happier about. As I interviewed parents for this chapter, I realized more and more that children who just do this stuff every time without a reminder, whether it’s clearing a plate or doing the laundry, are few and far between, and that it takes a long time—longer than I ever would have imagined—for most of us to get there. And children that do their chores without complaining are even more rare. The children who happily get up and clear the table at your house? I talked to their parents. They’re not like that at home.
Really establishing a chore routine requires a consistency that we can rarely achieve at our house. The one area where we achieve that is the horse barn. Every morning, before school, we go to the barn to help with whatever feeding and mucking is required (it varies by season and weather). Three things make this work: it happens every weekday at the same time; I’m working, too; and the job has to be done. It’s the essence of routine, and it gets more difficult (and the complaining increases) in the summer or any time the routine is interrupted.
When it comes to household chores, though, the routine is always changing, which meant we needed to find consistency in something else. After interviewing parents for this chapter, I made changes to my expectations for my kids, and for myself and my spouse. First, my husband and I agreed: chores matter, and we’re going to expect that they’re done, even when there is homework, even when there are sports, even when it would be far easier to just do it ourselves. Then, we changed our approach. Each child has one significant chore for the year (making lunches, feeding household animals, emptying the dishwasher, or taking out the trash nightly). The remaining chores—the before- and after-dinner ones—rotate monthly instead of weekly, and the children sat down and agreed on how the after-dinner cleanup, in particular, could be fairly divided. It’s early days yet, but the shift seems to be working. There’s somehow more gravitas to “this is your September chore” than there is to “it’s your turn to clear the table.” Still, there is complaining, and there is forgetting, and there is always some degree of resentment that someone else’s load is somehow lighter.
Accepting those things—that this takes time, that it’s important enough to make the time, and that no matter what we say or do, our children are going to complain—made us a lot happier. We expect to remind our children about their chores, and we don’t feel like failed parents every time we do it, which helps us to skip the yelling and just say it again. We expect to need to give direction and to periodically require that a chore done poorly be done over. It’s our job to teach them to do theirs.
What’s consistent isn’t the chores, or their timing, or what it takes to get the children to get the work done. It’s something we control: our expectation that our children will help us daily as well as when we ask and that they’ll do their jobs right. When we make that the focus, as opposed to their memory or their attitude, we can feel good about what we’re doing even when things don’t seem to be going so well.
three
SIBLINGS: THEY CAN BRING THE FUN, AND THEY CAN TAKE IT AWAY
Get out!”
“It’s my room, too! I don’t have to!”
“But I came up here with my homework to get away from you. I’m working!”
“I’m doing my homework, too! I have to memorize this! ‘Sing to me of the man, Muse, the man of twists and turns, driven time and again off course . . .’”
“Stop it!”
“‘Once he has plundered the—the heights—the hallowed—’”
“STOP IT!”
“But I have to learn this! I have to!”
“MOOOOOMMMMMM!”
Wouldn’t it be fun to have siblings who loved each other, played together, stood up for each other, and took care of each other? If only. Instead, those of us with big families too often find ourselves in the Mafia don role of overseeing ever-shifting rivalries and loyalties, while parents of two children watch one-on-one versions of the same games of envy, competition, love, and hatred. And of course, if you’re the parent of an only child, the complaints often come from the outside. Will he be selfish, spoiled, self-centered, unsocialized? (Research says no.) I just heard a story of someone changing pediatricians because one doc kept offering what was apparently a saying in her family: “Only children are lonely children.”
If you’re the parent of a single child, you can skip over this chapter, enjoy the schadenfreude, or read it for ideas that might work when friends are around or extended family is in town. Sibling battles aren’t sucking away any of your happiness. (Although if the general tenor of the societal reaction to your family choice is, you should read Lauren Sandler’s One and Only: The Freedom of Having an Only Child, and the Joy of Being One.)
If you do have multiple kids, then read on. Sibling battles are without a doubt in my top three when it comes to the question, “What sucks for you about parenting?” (Mornings and homework are my other two.) In fact, over the period of writing this book, sibling battles edged out the other two for the top spot. My two daughters, then eleven and twelve, were at a low point in their relationship.
The opening lines of the battle described above (accompanied by the opening lines of The Odyssey) were launched in some form many, many times a day, along with such classics as “That’s my charger!,” “Stop singing!,” and “I was sitting there!” Their fights became the center of all of our family interactions, the first thing I brought up with other parents, the thing that kept me awake at night, and, at one point, the talk of their entire hockey team. They were, I told my husband, ruining our lives.
Here’s the good news: as I researched and wrote this chapter, two things happened, in this order:
I figured out how to get a grip on my own reaction to their endless, escalating bickering.
And things got better.
What Goes Wrong
Of course I’m going to tell you what changed. But first, let’s look, as in every other chapter, at “what goes wrong” here—and, for a change, at what goes right, which we may be losing sight of amid all the chaos. Becoming a happier parent of multiple children isn’t just about how we approach the conflict. It’s also about appreciating all the other moments. Brothers and sisters fight, yes. Parent-reported and observational studies put the number of conflicts between young siblings (seven and under) at between three and seven an hour, and the amount of time spent on those conflicts at about ten minutes of every hour.
Ten minutes. I don’t know about you, but I would have guessed way higher. And my overemphasis on those conflicts may be part of the problem. It’s easier to see what’s wrong than what’s right. Research suggests brothers and sisters have good and natural reasons for conflict. In children of all ages, but especially younger children, the urge to compete for parental attention is innate, and not all bad. Among teens specifically, sibling conflict helps them work out their need to differentiate from family an
d one another, and to set their own boundaries. Some jostling, at a minimum, is probably inevitable, and pitched verbal and physical battles are normal and even expected.
That doesn’t mean parents, with help from our usual accomplice society, can’t still make things worse. Focusing on the bad times rather than the good is only one of our many well-intentioned mistakes. We compare our children, stick ourselves in the middle of their battles, favor one over the other, or get drawn into their need that everything be “fair.” We expect too much in the way of love and affection between them or demand too little in the way of tolerating differences and playing safe. We put all our effort and attention onto the fighting and conflict, and leave the good times to happenstance. We stick a different label on our children collectively, one that says, “They don’t get along.”
The world around us contributes by offering up a view of siblings in media that emphasizes the fighting far more than the family. When one researcher created a program exposing children to books and cartoons that included sibling conflict resolution on the theory that they might help aid children in learning to solve their own problems, she found that the children learned something else. As described in Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman’s NurtureShock, “After six weeks, the sibling relationship quality had plummeted.” Why? Because the media taught the kids “novel ways to be mean to younger siblings they’d never considered.” Siblings, the children in the study learned, were supposed to fight and tease. In her later study of 261 books that portrayed sibling relationships, the same researcher found that the average book “demonstrated virtually as many negative behaviors as positive ones.” Those unintentional demonstrations, it seems, are just as effectively conveyed as the everyone-gets-along-again endings, and maybe more so.
How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute Page 7
