At what point do you stop cleaning your kid’s room and start getting them to look after it and make their bed and put their stuff away properly? It’s definitely before 18, right?
I know lots of people who get their children to help out around the house, some reward the help with pocket money, and others seem to see it as ‘well you live here for free so the least you can do is take out the rubbish and empty the dishwasher.’
I don’t judge those families at all, nor do I judge those who don’t ask anything of their children. Mostly because I’ve not decided where I sit on the matter. As the father of a seven-year-old, I’m trying to find the balance between getting him to not be a lazy and entitled little peanut and not asking so much of him it feels like he’s an employee.
Besides, he’s too young to be doing a lot of those kinds of chores anyway. He’s not able to mow the lawn or take the bins out and even if he was, not sure I’d trust him to do either of them properly.
Grateful for early education
But there’s a middle ground I think, and that middle ground was established in childcare. As I’ve written about before, the two personalities thing is, well it’s very much a thing. The thoughtful young boy who would pick his up book and place it carefully back on the bookshelf at childcare would often frisbee the book in the general direction of the room he got it from when he was at home.
The obedient student who’d pack his things into his bag at the end of the day for his educators would seldom even carry the bag in from the car for his mother and I. And so began the arduous process of reminding him of his perfect manners and practices at childcare and how we’d love for them to be more prevalent at home.
It was like magic!
And then, as if by magic, he discovered something we’d previously hoped he wouldn’t: currency. He discovered that if he had money, he could get things. What things exactly didn’t seem to matter, he just wanted the freedom to be able to get stuff if he so desired.
Introducing the chore chart. Oh, the chore chart. No, we could get him to do all the tasks we’d thought were too unreasonable to ask of him, too militant to enforce. Now he was doing them of his own volition… in exchange for payment.
We did have to put our foot down just a little as he had decided that feeding the dog every day was worth thirty dollars. And that if he fed her twice, that was a hundred dollars because thirty and thirty, when you are seven, is whatever you want it to be.
Finding a way forward
So more middle ground to be found; what was a reasonable amount to pay him for doing the things he’d been doing since childcare for free? Pocket money is not something I invented, it’s presumably been around since the dawn of time when parents, like myself, wanted a little help around the house or cave or whatever.
But as Sir Isaac Newton once said, “If I’ve seen further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” And the giants I’m referring to are my close friends with kids older than mine who said, “Just reward with him things you planned on getting him anyway. Or get him to use his allowance to put towards it.”
So the bike I bought for him a few weeks ago because he’d outgrown his old one, he now thinks he got for tidying his room and keeping his bathroom clean. And because he feels he contributed, I think he takes more pride and care in it. Win-win.
