Another enlightened parent fail

[drwex]

I'm about ready to throw in the towel on another of my enlightened parenting experiments. It goes something like this:

In our household, the children don't get an allowance. Instead they have a few mandatory chores, mostly to do with self-care (do homework, clean own room, pack lunch, get dressed, brush teeth/hair, etc) for which they can earn small monetary rewards. To handle the larger chores, which I was routinely assigned as a child, I figured a voluntary system would work better. The kids can choose to do some laundry task or dishes task, or help take out the trash or do some yardwork and are paid when they do so. I remind them that such opportunities are available, and hold off doing some things with the timeliness I would like in order to give them time to complete the chore in their own way. In theory this is a better system, giving the kids more options and fewer demands.

As you can probably guess, this has descended into utter failure. Even though I remind them that they have many chances to earn money for things they want (a new D.S., a copy of Civ V of their own - yes I'm evil and hook my kids on videogames; are you surprised?) the kids don't take the time to earn money when reminded. We've also tried the option of "natural consequences" - when they didn't want to do the laundry for a couple weeks they found that they lacked for clean socks and underwear. This led to complaining, of course, and parents repeatedly reminding them that not only did they have many opportunities to do the laundry we would even pay them for it. No dice.

The enlightened parent way: offer choices, give rewards for effort, provide encouragement and reminders, avoid penalties and punishments, associate tasks with rewards the kids find meaningful, and allow natural rather than artificial consequences. This, my friends, is bullshit. It Does Not Work. No, seriously. I get that there are some extraordinary kids out there for whom this kind of thing works. Parents of those kids write books gushing about the virtues of their enlightened parenting methods and their angelic offspring. I now wish to find each and every such parent and smack them for writing such books. And now back to reality.

In my reality I'm thinking strongly about going back to an allowance/chore system. The kids would get a fixed amount per week and would be assigned chores such as dishes, trash, and laundry on some kind of rotating system. I suppose it would be nice to leave in place some kind of upside so they can earn more money, but I expect them to ignore it. Also because I'm not a completely heartless bastard I probably won't include major chores like yardwork/shoveling and might allow them to swap chores around.

But since I'm a STUBBORN bastard I figured I'd see if anyone had any suggestions for things I hadn't tried because I want to claim I explored every possible cooperative avenue before I impose this system on the kids top-down. Of course I plan to warn them that this is coming and give them time to adjust to the upcoming change; but this morning's episode where the kids ignored the counter stacked high with dishes so they could just put their (unrinsed) dirty dishes on the top of the stack for someone else to wash was kind of the breaking point.

Comments

[pierceheart.livejournal.com]

I have never been a parent.

Do what you are planning on doing, giving them an allowance and set chores, and have a downside factored in - things don't get done, they lose pay.

[caulay.livejournal.com]

Yeah, that.

Of course, I grew up with chores and no pay. If I wanted money, I had to find my own job (paperboy).

[ahf.livejournal.com]

I know they did get it for a while. The day I was over a few months ago, they were writing a letter to the town selectmen about the trash someone had strewn all over the side of the road. L pointed out that in a way it was good for them. When I asked why, he explained that picking up the trash earned them money and that if someone left trash every week they could get X (whatever thing they were after, I forget what) sooner.

I think they get the money-for-work thing

[drwex]

but they don't get the "if nobody does this stuff then bad things will happen" part.

[missionista.livejournal.com]

What about separating chores from allowance entirely? I grew up having chores. I also grew up getting an allowance. The two were separate things.

The allowance was more for me to learn about ways of handling money, and only came about because I saw it on TV, and asked if I could have one. The allowance was really small, too--25 cents per week when I was 7--so it was enough to get concepts like saving, spending, etc., but not enough that withholding it would be a true punishment for not doing chores.

The chores were because everyone has to do chores, end of story.

[badseed1980.livejournal.com]

That's kind of the way it was for me in my family. Generally, we were only asked to pick up after ourselves during the week, and to put away our laundry after my mom took it out of the dryer. On weekends, the whole family would divide up the chores involved in cleaning the house. Someone took the bathroom, someone dusted, someone vaccumed, etc. We all worked at it at the same time. Also, when I got a Walkman, I found that listening to music while I did my chores made it more pleasant. Maybe your kids could use MP3 players or something to make the time pass more quickly while they work.

[tamidon.livejournal.com]

that's the way we do it with the girls. There are certain chores that are part of being in this household. Mom makes dinner, so it makes sense they do the trash, cat box, and putting away clean dishes. I do my laundry they do theirs. Their room must be tidied on a regular basis, and their bathroom dealt with.
There are chores that get money:helping clean out the chicken coop, shoveling snow,raking leaves, etc...
Allowance is given separately from this. Alyssa now also earns money babysitting and has extra car expenses that we take care of

[ciani.livejournal.com]

tell them that since you're willing to pay them for doing their laundry, you're going to charge them if you have to do it for them?

yeah I'm mostly kidding :) I wasn't allowed to touch the washing machine at my mom's, and I don't have any good suggestions.

I'm not kidding

[drwex]

Part of my plan is that if they don't do the assigned chore they have to pay to have it done.

[bluegargantua]

I think your kids are smarter than you think. They've clearly realized that the top 50% of the household makes 100% of the money. The wealth gap is, in many ways, much worse than society at large. If the wealthy elite don't want to see civil uprisings, they should be prepared to contribute more to establish and maintain a social safety net that will let the bottom 50% (who are pretty much incapable of finding legal work even if the employment picture was good) live a tolerable existence.

Occupy Your Living Room
Tom

[melebeth]

Why is there no "like" on live journal?

[dcltdw]

Caveat: I am not a parent, and even so, have a weak understanding of how kids think.

I feel tempted to invoke first principles here: c.f. missionista above. Chores exist to 1, get help, 2, instill responsibility, and 3, instill self-reliance. Allowance is to do #2 and #3 with regards to money, which is sufficiently different.

So my thinking is: if System #1 fails to achieve the first principles, okay, throw out System #1 and try System #2; iterate as needed. Which I think is what you're doing, but I'm not sure, which is the reason for me posting this long reply. :)

---

Also because I'm not a completely heartless bastard I probably won't include major chores like yardwork/shoveling and might allow them to swap chores around. [...] but this morning's episode where the kids ignored the counter stacked high with dishes so they could just put their (unrinsed) dirty dishes on the top of the stack for someone else to wash was kind of the breaking point.

Soooo, yeaaaah, check out this giant bag of I So Don't Know What I'm Talking About that I have here. Not to mention not really knowing your kids. Okay, caveats asides... is there too much option here?

For self-reliance, sure, it's good to know how to cook, clean, do laundry, etc, so rotating chores on a fixed schedule accomplishes that. And if there isn't any room for swapping, then (ha! presumably) no energy is spent on negotiating/wheedling. (Heh heh. Ahh, I crack myself up sometimes.)

Of course, this totally fails if you're trying to instill a sense of Do Something Today Rather Than Procrastinate Until Tomorrow, and well, umm, I, ah, never learned that lesson. ;)

[tigira.livejournal.com]

F gets an allowance and has chores. If he doesn't feed the cat, he loses half his allowance. His other chores are more self care - pick up his toys, put his dirty clothes down the laundry chute, etc. When he remembers to do his chores, he also remembers to follow up for the allowance.

Also, I had been going the "allow your kid to make choices" route. It upsets F to have too many choices. So his choices are what he wears on any particular day (with minimal parental feedback, though I don't really want him to wear his tie ALL the time, as much as he likes it).

I am starting to back away from asking him what he wants for dinner on the nights that we do not all eat together, though. By the time we get to that conversation, it's "hell hour" and it usually ends in yelling.

Just my experience, though. I think we all just really muddle through.

Yeah, K doesn't do well with too many choices

[drwex]

that's why we usually pick one thing, like "there's a lot of laundry that could be done if you want to make money" or "dishes need cycling - who wants the money".

I'm actually afraid part of the problem is going to be them seeing all the chores that need doing each week and overloading.

[noire.livejournal.com]

Not a parent as you know but I recently read an article about kids being required to do chores and it being good for them. By a psychologist who had all kinds of rationales for why children need to be involved in work around the house.

I certainly was required to do chores when I was a kid, but there were opportunities to earn over my allowance when my parents needed extra help (special thorough cleaning before a party is what I particularly remember.) I think I was a bit older than your boys when I decided that the trade off (work for money) was worth the effort.

They do have chores

[drwex]

I guess I wasn't clear about that in the main post. They have to pick up after themselves and clean their rooms and do self-care chores. Just not bigger house-maintenance things.

[blackanvil.livejournal.com]

Yeah, my parents tried this (well, Dad did) and were disappointed with the results. He offered minimum wage for chores like mowing, raking, yardwork, painting, etc.

The problem was that we could make more, often a lot more, doing that sort of work at the neighbors -- and that meant that Dad had to do the work, because we were out doing it elsewhere.

So it turned into "Do this anyway, without pay." Well, that wasn't much fun. Then we both got jobs and were no longer available. Then college, and out from under the parents' wings.

One Thanksgiving, I called home to see if I could come visit. Dad's response was "Sure, I need some yardwork done, and the gutters need cleaning." I didn't come to visit that Thanksgiving, or ever again, until after they got divorced. At this point in time, dad was a Sr. VP at a large chemical waste remediation company. He just couldn't help but try to treat us as cheap, unskilled labor. I noticed my brother never went to visit them either.

[donnad.livejournal.com]

but this morning's episode where the kids ignored the counter stacked high with dishes so they could just put their (unrinsed) dirty dishes on the top of the stack for someone else to wash was kind of the breaking point.

I do have a question about this.
Who's dishes were in the stacked high pile? If they were all the kids dishes fine then giving them grief is okay IMO. But if they weren't, you can't fault the kids for leaving the dishes there. If you and their mother can leave a dish/glass to be washed later, then why can't they?

They will take their cues from you and pygment, if they see you leaving dishes for later they will do the same. If your clothing is left on the floor they will leave theirs on the floor. My mother used to say "Monkey see, Monkey do."

I do think that they should have chores to do and not be expected to be paid for them. If they go above and beyond, like doing the stuff like yardwork or shoveling, then they should get a reward.
A once a month allowance of a few dollars so they can learn how to manage money is not a bad idea. Tying it to chores, maybe, it means taking time to sit down with each of the boys and say, you didn't do this without whining and complaining, this didn't get done at all etc. may be too stressful in the end.

Maybe create a chart of the chores for each day and assign them to each kid/member of the household, put you and Pygment on it too so they can see how much you both do in relation to the things they are asked to do. Print it out, hang it on the fridge. Include everything, laundry, dishes, sweeping, vacuuming, stripping beds, washing towels and sheets and folding and putting them away, bathroom cleaning (list each chore, scrub tub, scrub sink, scrub toilet, wash floor etc. so there is no question what is expected.) I would even include their homework on the chart since it is expected they will do that daily as well.

Good luck.

Mostly they were the kids' dishes

[drwex]

They generate dishes at meals and also from reusable containers that we have them pack their lunches in. The house rule is that if the dishwasher is available (has dirty dishes and not full, or empty) then dishes are supposed to be rinsed and put in. So they failed even to check for that, which is a problem. But the bigger problem is getting them engaged in the necessities of house maintenance.

[nounsandverbs]

Our kids are assigned chores, not because there's a reward involved, but because it's their house and they're expected to help maintain it just like everyone who lives here. Of course, they don't WANT to do any of those chores, so yeah, there's a lot of reminding, cajoling, grumbling, and occasional yelling and removal of privileges such as TV and computer time. But if you're looking for a technique that "works" -- in the sense of getting the chores done every time with almost no hassle -- well, I've never encountered one. Either we put in the work to get them to do the chores, or the chores mostly don't get done. (The big exception is homework, which they're generally good about doing every day with no fuss. But it took years for them to get that way.)

Then again, we grownups don't always set the greatest example when it comes to finishing OUR chores, so perhaps we have no one to blame but ourselves.

Yes, I think this is rather the main message

[drwex]

They don't like that they're expected to help maintain the household. That needs to change.

[chienne-folle.livejournal.com]

To me, families are special entities, not like other organizations or institutions out there. I don't charge my husband for making his dinner, and he doesn't charge me for mowing the lawn. Belonging to a family means that it comes with certain benefits and certain responsibilities built in. Each of us gets the benefits of belonging to the family, and each of us has responsibilities to it.

If I had children, I would give them both chores and an allowance but have those things be separate. I would explain it like this: Because the family has some money, you get a small share of it to use as you wish, and that's your allowance. Because the family has work that must be done, you get a small share of it that you must perform, and those are your chores. The allowance isn't paid because the chores are done, and the chores aren't done to justify the allowance; both exist because being a member of this family comes with both benefits and responsibilities. As you grow and become able to handle more, your share of both the money and the responsibilities will grow.

I'm not a parent, of course. But this is how it looks to me.

Thank you

[drwex]

That's an interestingly different point of view.

[aelf.livejournal.com]

Chores are assigned in this house. Members of a family contribute to its upkeep and its enjoyment. Zoe shares in the work and the fun of our family. We do chores as a family, because Mike has extreme difficulty working alone (he's easily distracted). Zoe works better as a member of a team than as a solitary worker as well. (Knowing this about each other is an important part of making our system work.)

I'll also spell out the consequences. If she chooses not to help with the laundry, ok. That means she's also choosing to handle her own clothing. She can elect to wash it herself, wear it filthy, or go stark naked. It makes no difference to me. But if she wants me to wash her clothes, then she helps with the laundry.

I just don't argue with her. She will help with the laundry, or she won't benefit from my labor. She will help with the dishes or she will not have a plate set for her for dinner. I think these are natural consequences. And fortunately, my child is so far not a cut-off-her-nose-to-spite-her-face child. (If she were, I suspect she'd spent a lot of time in her room avoiding me explaining to her in excruciating detail how extremely rude and selfish she's being.)

I'm glad your kid works this way

[drwex]

Mine would cheerfully wear filthy clothes and one of them is upstairs in his room as I type this, in part to avoid having to face how rude and selfish he was.

*sigh*

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

How much are you offering for the larger chores? I bet they would do them if the amount were high enough to motivate them. Not that this is a good solution, but I'm just curious.

Further thoughts

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

My perspective as a mom: Ilana's allowance has never been tied to chores. I don't give her as many regular responsibilities as I probably should. She has to brush hair & teeth 2X/day, shower at least every other day, do her homework & read at least 30 mins. per night, tidy her room when I decide it's bad enough, and put her own dishes in the dishwasher after meals. Unfortunately, she needs to be reminded, sometimes nagged, to do all those things, which I hate. I have offered to pay her if she wants to do extra work, but money isn't a motivator for her. Sometimes she'll do extra work just because she wants to be helpful.

My perspective as a former kid: I love tidying, organizing, and cleaning now, but as a kid, I resisted doing chores as much as most. I think it was because I didn't feel a sense of ownership of anything but my own room, which I did keep clean. It aggravated my mother, but she handled it badly, being generally bitchy about it and calling me a "parasite," which still hurts, and did not make me want to do more chores. As soon as I had my own place, I loved taking care of it. I wonder if I would have been more motivated if I could have had more of a role in choosing furniture, arrangement of stuff, decor, and things like that in the house in general, to make it feel more my space too as opposed to just my mom's.

My perspective as a professional organizer: Kids learn everything by watching you. What do they learn about doing housework from watching you? Do you complain about it? Act like you hate it? Put it off? Do you do it when they're not around (which I'm sure is more convenient, but then they don't see it getting done)? Do you hire other people to do it? Do you talk about how great it is when a task gets done? (For instance, I rave happily when I see that dimers has cleaned the kitchen after messy meal prep.) I think the more you build housework in as a natural, organic, and even pleasurable part of your lives, the easier it will be to get the kids involved. Also think of ways to make it more fun, for both you and them. Ilana likes it when we play dance music when we're cleaning her room, and sometimes she plays with the water and soap when she's doing dishes. She's getting into cooking because it lets her be creative (and use fire!). And so forth. Attitude counts for a lot.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

Ilana says the kids should be bribed, but not with money. With privileges like TV and gaming time. Interesting idea.

Rolling up answers

[drwex]

I offer something like 50 cents for each step of a chore. So taking all the laundry downstairs is 50 cents. Starting a load in the washer is another 50, moving washed clothes to dryer, etc.

When it's particularly big I offer more. Like this week there was a LOT of recycling to go out so I paid $2 rather than the usual $1.

The kids do have electronic time and can, in theory earn more. I am reluctant to hook everything to that one reward though. Money is more fun for them as they can buy magic cards, D&D books, DS games, etc with it. Plus with things like holidays and Arisia coming up they enjoy being set loose in the store or on dealer's row with cash in hand.

[sykotropic.livejournal.com]

You have gotten lots of good tidbits All I will add is that parenting is a whole lot of gray and the sooner we realize that the easier it is. I am probably more authoritative then most of the comments I read so take what I say with a grain of salt. What I say is that we (the parents) are in chrge. If I change the rules and explain why I did so then the child goes along. In our house older child gets $3 for "general participation in life." She earns an unset other amount for over and above -- such as watching her 4 year old younger brother for an hour or more while her father teaches. Set your goals as to your childrens's behavior and then decide what reward they get. To decide a reward to drive behaviour is ass backwards.

[c1.livejournal.com]

A weird thing happened to me today.
I've been chafing under the yoke of my PITA boss at work for some time now. I'm entirely hourly: there's theoretically no upper limit to the amount I could earn in a week, as long as I do the time.
Yet, I come in late, leave as early as I can, and deal with the fact that I have less money than I'd want.
Today, my co-worker (also my BFF since high school) articulated why I'm doing this.

For the past three weeks straight, I've come in to work, sanded metal for a few hours, and gone home at the end of the day. In between, I get plenty of time to think about where my life is at the moment, the state of the economy, the odds I'll get a better job in the future... in short, just how ugly things are. Sanding metal isn't what you should think of when you imagine tasks that have a high cognitive overhead.
So put simply, can you imagine how much this colours my thoughts toward working toward that functionally non-existent pay ceiling? It's a daily, hours-long session of those few minutes you spend worrying about things just before you drift off to sleep; the only difference is that I take a lunch break in the middle. (And for the record, I already spend enough time worrying about things before I drift off to sleep every night, thank you very much.)

The kids have it pretty good. The roof is over their head for sure, they're going to be fed in perpetuity, and their other needs will be taken care of by mysterious machinations unknown to them (they're kids, after all). Work is hard and awful when they could be playing and having fun. So similarly, though their pay ceiling is functionally non-existent (at least for the amounts of money they could reasonably think they'd ever see from their benevolent employer) there is little there to drive them to think past the awful feelings they have toward those tasks they'd have to endure in order to earn pocket money.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

Great point. Kids aren't so good with the planning ahead and delayed gratification.

As for you, and I hope you don't mind a bit of amateur psychotherapy here, it sounds like you're digging deep neural pathways of awfulness during your work time. If you're not chronically depressed now, you're going to be. Can you listen to music, audiobooks, or podcasts while you work? Or is there some other way you can get your brain into a happier place during your work hours?

[ringrose.livejournal.com]

This is an interesting thread to read, because eventually my daughter will be to the point of doing chores.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

Model, model, model! Now! That will make it a lot easier later on.

[entrope.livejournal.com]

We usually assign chores which are just things that we all have to do because we have to live together. They get money separately. We base the chores on what's solidly considered age-appropriate, which can pretty easily be found in books about executive function (if you're curious, I have several). Simone, for example is responsible for putting her clothes in the hamper, setting her place at the table, general putting-away of her playthings and books, and putting away her clean, folded clothes. She needs help sometimes, but she's pretty good about letting me know when a job seems too big for her. I'm satisfied with that.

The other kid, though, is a particularly frustrating case. I don't think your kids have a Swiss-cheese-like executive function like Sabine does, but wow, does it ever give me grey hair. She's 16 years old, and still has a hard time with her four household chores: walk the dog, do her own laundry, clear the table after dinner, and clean the bathroom. I used to require her to wash the dishes, but it was a lost cause. We would have zero clean dishes in the house and she would look at me helplessly and ask where the clean glasses were. Also, she had no trouble finding a fork when she needed one to eat with, but damned if she could ever remember where they were kept when she needed to put them away. Dishwashing was doomed to failure. It made me REALLY furious when I tried all the things you tried, then tried a top-down approach, but to no avail.

I finally spoke to the psychoeducational assessor about it, and she said that we, as parents, would have to come up with a comprehensive plan to teach her how to do/remember household chores. She said that we would first have to find a way to work within her executive function limitations, and then readjust our expectations so that we didn't completely lose our shit WHEN (not if) she failed and backslid repeatedly. She was right. For the past three years, about three hours of each day is spent on what amounts to executive function coaching. We've taught her ad nauseum how to break down tasks, schedule them, etcetera, and she still can't manage to think about her laundry until five minutes before she's due to leave for her dad's house.

When my kids don't perform to my age-appropriate expectation, there's usually some legitimate reason that they can't. All the fantastic parenting in the world won't make a kid do something that, for whatever reason, they can't do. It's unlikely that this is what's happening with your kids, but discovering that made my life (and Sabine's, in particular) SO MUCH EASIER.

[anotherjen.livejournal.com]

It sounds to me based on Sabine's FB updates that she is concerned about her issues in these areas and is trying her best, so that's something, at least. I don't think Ilana gives a thought to her poor time management skills. But then, she's 10. We'll see.

[intuition-ist.livejournal.com]

my $0.02 -- fundamentally, i think you and P. have managed to have kids with totally different outlooks on the world than either of you. that's hard to deal with all 'round.

when there is doubt and confusion, go back to the beginning. what did it mean to the two of you to have a son in the first place? did you see yourselves inculcating them with certain types of behaviors? how much of the above is the noise, and how much is the signal?

also, what is the desired result: obedient children, a clean house, or something else?

they won't be rational (as you see it) until they're past 25. make sure they know the important things. dishes are the least of it.