
Why Children Need Chores - prostoalex
http://wsj.com/articles/why-children-need-chores-1426262655
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kendallpark
> Like a videogame, start small and have young children earn new “levels” of
> responsibilities, like going from sorting clothes to earning the right to
> use the washing machine.

I feel like kids are smarter than this. When my mom made me start doing my own
laundry at age 12 I did not feel like I was winning at life.

> Talk about chores differently. For better cooperation, instead of saying,
> “Do your chores,” Dr. Rende suggests saying, “Let’s do our chores.” This
> underscores that chores are not just a duty but a way of taking care of each
> other.

I completely agree with this. I think this was the biggest piece missing from
the way chores worked in my family. We had a cleaning lady and my mom had her
clean less and less of the house as we got older in order to teach us
responsibility via chores. But it was a very individualized thing and always
felt like an artificially engineered scenario.

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andrewljohnson
Hard to put much past a 12-year old, sounds like your mom started too late :)

My 2-year old loves to "help" sort laundry, and loves to take laundry to the
machine, even when it's clean.

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AnkhMorporkian
I remember begging my mom to let me do dishes when I was 4 years old. She
spent so much time over the sink that I just assumed that it must be fun. I
may have been proven wrong, but it certainly got me in the habit of keeping my
sink empty.

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oh_sigh
Do you really have any insight into what you were thinking when you were 4
years old? I assume you have no idea if you really thought it was "fun", or if
it was just something that people did, and therefore you should mimic it.

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Spooky23
My son is 3, and is at almost all times making the case that he is a "big
boy"... That's a big factor. Fun is always a factor, because kids love to hang
out with the parents.

Besides that, he just wants to help in any way he can. The other day he was
piling laundry into a big dump truck, and rigged it to tow another vehicle to
transport laundry to the room where my wife was folding.

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wodenokoto
Related to this: in Japan the school children have to clean the class room and
hallways. It's an integrated part of going to school and I think it is
brilliant on so many levels.

Best case, it saves money on staff, teaches children how to clean and how to
be respectful of their environment.

Obviously there are some potential for cruelty, like if you know it's
Hashimoto's turn to clean today and you think he's a wimp, you can save some
dirt somewhere for him to deal with.

I don't think this is a problem in Japan, and regardless, let's be honest:
kids are real assholes sometimes regardless of what you do.

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pcurve
They serve each other food too. Very cute!

[https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7aGHNNpGlM](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v7aGHNNpGlM)

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RogerL
It's perhaps just due to this being a too brief article, but I don't buy the
science as presented. Correlation is not causation. The children that did
chores at 3-4 may have grown up to have good relationships due to other
factors in the family that also caused chores.

Then the Weissbourd study says nothing about chores. All it reports is the #
of people that valued achievement, happiness, or caring for others more.

I don't know. I'm not arguing for or against chores, but I don't think this
article made a convincing case for its headline.

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parfe
>Correlation is not causation.

Case fucking closed then. I cherish the in depth commentary Hn has to offer
regarding scientific studies

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brohoolio
Chores definitely helped me appreciate everything my members family did once I
got a little older.

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cellularmitosis
Leaving this article open causes my computer to do a bunch of writes, once per
second, and it never seems to stop.

What tool(s) can I use to figure out why this page is hitting my hard drive
every second?

(running chrome on windows xp)

~~~
danparsonson
Try the Sysinternals utilities ([https://technet.microsoft.com/en-
gb/sysinternals/](https://technet.microsoft.com/en-gb/sysinternals/)) -
Process Explorer would be a good place to start, and Process Monitor if you're
feeling a bit more adventurous.

edit: I should add that Mark Russinovich, who wrote these tools, has also
blogged a fair bit over the years about using them to solve mysteries such as
yours - e.g.
[http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2012/10/3...](http://blogs.technet.com/b/markrussinovich/archive/2012/10/30/3529266.aspx)

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fsiefken
There's an android app called choremaster to gamify the chores a bit.

~~~
stevesearer
I feel like my mother did something similar on my brother and I minus the
experience points.

She would write out all of our chores as well as the fun things we would like
to do that day. We would then try to complete chores quickly in order to get
to the fun things we chose. From what I remember, we would even race to see
who could get a better time at emptying all of the trash cans in the house and
things like that.

We also had autonomy in which chores to complete first but she would be sure
to explain to us that if we did all of our fun things first, we would then
have a huge block of chores which would not be fun.

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Dewie
"Don't be such a Negative Nancy" \- If you hate work and chores yourself, do
you really think your kids are going to develop a better attitude than you?

