Housework may seem like a trifling thing. It isn’t. Anyone who judges housework unimportant might revisit decades of “chore wars” over work and gender roles for men and women. It may seem like a no-brainer to assume kids should do chores, but as a matter of course, US children do very little. In analyses of time-use studies, professor Sandra Hofferth and her colleagues at the University of Maryland Population Research Center estimate that, at last count, kids aged 6 to 12 do less than a half-hour of work a day. School is sometimes presented as the “work” we expect of our kids, and when homework is done they’re free to play. That arrangement is problematic. Housework, real work, still remains. Children should take it up because they enjoy the goods of the household, because they probably have more time than their parents to do it, and because they gain competence and responsibility in the process.
arents might think domestic skills beneath their children’s worth, a waste of their precious time. But parents — also characters with worth and precious time — usually end up doing those tasks instead. And we, a democratic people, are not ones to assign some the caste of cleanup while others simply play. Work at home does not have to be a punishment. Learning to do chores helps children mature, helps orient them to the common good.
A practical objection is that teaching kids how to do household jobs takes much more time than it does for the parents simply to do the jobs themselves. This is true. That time devoted to instruction is important, though, an apprenticeship of sorts. We should hold out the hope that someday — in best cases, before their parents lie cold in a tomb — our offspring will do these domestic tasks competently on their own.
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