Flashback to childhood: Why kids don't like chores

It's easy to take the easy way out when
doing chores, and kids know it.

As I was voluntarily doing the dishes tonight for my 9-months pregnant wife, I had a flashback to by childhood. Tonight, the table was littered with enough crumbs to feed all the mice in the long grass behind our house for a week. This is actually a normal scenario in my household with the two self-feeding tornadoes I call my kids.

But as I was finishing emptying the sink, I had a heck of a time convincing myself to wash the tables and counter down. First I thought my wife would think I had done enough because I already did the dishes. But I looked at the table, knowing I didn't want my pregnant wife to have to do it. I still had to actively campaign against myself to choose the right.

Even as I took the rag and began to wipe the table, a wicked little thought hit: I could wipe all the crumbs onto the ground and not have to carry a mass of bread mush back to the sink. The wife wouldn't be the wiser since she expects to need to sweep after every meal, courtesy our children.

As I had this wicked little thought, I flashed back to my childhood, when I always just did the lazy thing, brushing crumbs from counters and tables onto the floor where it was no longer my problem. I can remember countless discussions with my parents about how to sweep the icky-nasty crumbs into my palm to carry over to the trash (trash compactors didn't exist back then, to my knowledge.) I knew how to do it, but my child's mind just rationalized naughtily that if I continued to do it wrong, one of two things would happen: 1. Nothing. 2. I would stop getting asked to do that chore. After all, I was young enough that my parents could actually believe I wasn't capable of doing it right, right?

Back then, it wasn't so much about getting out of work as it was about touching someone else's food particles. The concept just didn't appeal to me. Especially since the moist rag would turn it into a mush that felt like gooey oatmeal inside the rag, which I then had to clean out in the sink.

Not to say I didn't have my lazy streak. We washed all pots and pans (the big dishes, we called them) by hand. Nothing coated with Teflon touched the washing machine. So when it was my turn to wash the big dishes, I did a really cruddy job. On purpose. Because I didn't like it. And knew my Mom would just do it if I didn't. I'm pretty sure I left greasy streaks, bits of meat and entire spaghetti noodles still stuck to the bottom of the pan in the dishes I pronounced clean. Then when I got confronted on the crapitude of my work, I used this incredibly valid excuse: "I don't know how to do the big dishes." This was usually followed by a lengthy lesson on how to wash pots and pans satisfactorily. I knew how to do it. I was a smart kid. Did my parents buy that I didn't know how? No. I'm sure of that, in retrospect.

But my good-natured mother just took over when I let some slack in the reins, and yes, even stopped asking me to perform the chores on which my performance was an enormous bit of theater performance.

So sometimes the kids don't want to do the chores for reasons they don't state, like me with the mushy crumbs. And other times, they will convince you they don't know how to do a chore they can do adequately just to wear you down.

Don't let it happen. The kids are smart, but you still probably realize what they're doing. Don't pretend like you're falling for the routine. You know your kids. Give them the benefit of the doubt, when possible, but don't let them feed you excuses that an elephant couldn't swallow. You'll get a kid that will more often do things he/she doesn't want to do just because you asked.

How do you keep your kids honest about chore performance?

Toenail clippings in your eye and other life lessons learned from having a 3-year-old boy cut your nails

Though allowing a 3-year-old boy to clip your nails may
sound like a really bad idea because it is, it also isn't.
Allowing a child that age to help you when they want to
will aid in producing a lifetime work ethic in the kid.

Odd things happen when you involve kids in routine tasks like...I dunno...fingernail clipping.

My wife made this mistake recently and let our 3-year-old son clip her fingernails and toenails for her. Let's just say it was no professional manicure/pedicure. Her ragged nail edges now catch on anything remotely fuzzy (including our daughter's hair), some of her nails will probably become ingrown because of this, and I'm pretty sure one clipping has set up camp somewhere in her brain – possibly in her medulla oblongata. With a name like that, it can't be all that important anyway. That's why I just call my brain “the thinker.” You know what a “thinker” does. It's straightforward, easy to remember, and I didn't even have to consult Wikipedia for the spelling – I'm looking at you medulla...

Anway, this happened when our son, in his excitement, clipped a piece of toenail with such enthusiasm that it sailed through the sky with a smile on its invisible face into my wife's awaiting eyeball, where no smile was present. Wanting to make itself at home, the stray clipping tucked itself under my wife's eyelid and marched upward out of sight. Trust me: this is hard to do when you're hiding on an eyeball.

After playing “Go Fish” in her eye for several minutes without so much as a nibble, she came to me hoping I could find the toenail shard with her eyelid cocked halfway back like that creepy kid in high school that walked around with his eyelids reversed. No bones. Or toenails, as the case may be.

So I'm certain the little bugger is snugly wrapped up in some nice folds of gray matter, probably gleaning plenty of information from my wife's brilliant brain through osmosis.

But all that's beside the point. The whole point I want to impress is that my wife threw away all care for herself in letting a 3-year-old boy cut her finger and toenails. This is the gender that has found many ways to set itself on fire while drunk, fall off of cliffs and survive (mostly), and successfully forget they even had fingernails until a woman pointed out how dry and cracked they were to him. And he's three. Did I mention that?

This may be slightly crazy to some people, but what it demonstrates is of utmost importance. We must allow our children to participate when they are willing, otherwise there will come a time when they no longer want to help.

I got in a friendly argument with a woman I know through work recently about how to instill a love of work in children. I posited that you need to let kids do chores while they are tiny and want to “help” you or they will never want to help you as a teenager or whatever. Her idea was basically that children are pathetic weaklings and should go nowhere near chores until they are capable of doing them right. She then told me how much her 14-year old boy hates working in the garden.

Hmmm...maybe because she never let him near the garden when he wanted to be “mommy's big helper.” Attitudes established early on will carry through childhood and most likely throughout life. And if we constantly tell kids they aren't wanted in the kitchen, the garden, or anywhere else that doesn't involve SpongeBob SquarePants doing idiotic things, than they will learn to stay away from those places for most of their lives.

So next time your kid asks to help cut your nails right after a professional manicure, just roll your eyes and let the kid go to town. You'll have a much better household helper for it, even if a wandering band of fingernail clippings does start to terrorize your medulla oblongata.