Chores and Responsibility: A Parent's Complete Guide

Chapter 1: Why Chores Are About More Than Getting the House Clean

Let’s start with a scene you probably know by heart. It’s 5:45 on a Tuesday. You’ve been home from work for forty minutes, you’re trying to get dinner on the table, and you ask your six-year-old to put the blocks back in the bin before supper. You say it in what you think is a perfectly calm voice. Nothing happens. You say it again, this time with a little more edge. Your six-year-old is now building a tower. You say it a third time, and now you are kneeling on the floor beside them, pointing at the bin, and your voice has that tight, high quality that makes you sound like a stranger. The blocks get put away, but only because you are physically guiding their hands, and by the time it’s done, everyone is irritated, and you’re wondering why something so simple has to be so hard. You are not alone. I have watched this exact scene play out in a hundred different kitchens, with a hundred different children, and the details are always different but the feeling is always the same: Why won’t they just do it?

Before we talk about charts, rewards, consequences, or any of the practical tools that will come later in this book, we need to talk about what is actually happening in your child’s head and body when you ask them to do a chore. Because the truth is, most chore