Did you even consider that maybe girls aren't getting paid for personal hygiene because they just like being dirty?
But seriously, I was never paid for chores or hygiene. We just had to do it.
I pay my teenage boys if they tidy their bedrooms without my having told them to do it (which costs me very little per year), and for each book they read. The latter marks me as an awful failure as a parent, but it's the only way I can get Hitsuji to pick up a book at all.
Maybe we should have set up a system of paying my stepdaughter every time she washed her hands, but then she doesn't really care about money. Maybe we could have paid her in donuts but that wouldn't be healthy, and also after she ate the donut her hands would be dirty again.
I'm sure it would be trivial to hook up that app to a shock collar of some kind.
Boy did I not get my kids successful about doing chores in any kind of organized way. They'll clean the kitchen badly, they'll cook occasionally, their rooms are terrifying and the bathroom they share and are responsible for keeping clean is a post-apocalyptic hell-scape. On the other hand, I was a ghastly child along the same lines and sort of learned how to function like a person in college.
I went to college having run exactly one load of laundry before leaving, but I was reasonably well trained otherwise.
Well, it says who is more likely to be paid for participating in personal hygiene activities, not that it is common overall, though in this fallen world who knows.
the bathroom they share and are responsible for keeping clean is a post-apocalyptic hell-scape
Sounds like they will be prepared to face what is to come!
6: Yeah, I stopped paying money when I realized it all went to buy snacks or else snacks for classmates who can't afford snacks. I'll let them earn toward a specific desired item, but no allowances.
(I'm also at war with my mom, who thinks Nia is old enough to run a washing machine and should learn how. But I don't have money to pay for the repairs or replacement that would be inevitable if this came to pass, so nope nope nope. It's not going to happen.)
12.2: Does your mom have a washing machine Nia could practice on?
Thanks, hg!
I was a stubborn and recalcitrant child* and hated being told to do chores, but I did them, if unevenly. I always liked doing laundry and started doing it for most of the household when I was 10 or 11.
I have now turned into an adult who has the same high standards for dishwasher-loading that my father attempted for so many years to instill in me. Thanks, Dad. Apparently it all soaked in when I was trying not to listen.
*This has not appreciably changed.
cont'd
I would definitely not have been motivated by money to want to do chores. I always valued time (to read) more than money (to spend on what? I didn't need anything). I can't imagine being paid for personal hygiene -- even as a kid that would have struck me as bizarre.
My next-youngest sister is very motivated by money, and she was definitely paid for reading books. She got money for doing chores over and above what was normally expected.
Like, do the Thornspawn routinely carry lengths of scrap metal in their pockets, which a careless underage launderer might overlook?
I may have mentioned that my parents expected me and my sister to completely clean the kitchen every night, and in fact had a dozen years of doing no nighttime kitchen chores (from my age 8 to my sister's departure for college). I WANT MY TURN, and am completely willing to invest time training Steady to do chores now. I persist with a glad heart, because I see my sweet, sweet pay-off coming in only a few more years.
Mine are young enough that most of the time they love to help with any responsibility. The Calabat loves especially to clean out the car or assist in the garage, and Pebbles will gleefully announce "I'm the helper girl" and mostly get underfoot. I imagine that this will change in a few years (Calabat is already resisting on some things, as I'll explain) , but we're trying to set expectations -- chores are just things that are done to keep the household running, and you're part of the household.
We did have an awful failure with a sticker chart for practicing piano and completing other tasks. The chart had 25 squares, and we picked five tasks where we were arguing a lot with him, and figured the stickers would motivate him. This led to "I don't have to practice because I already have five stickers" when he had practiced piano but not cleaned his room. So that ended that experiment. We're going back to the old-fashioned mom-says-so enforcement.
Some people have obedient children. I'm so curious how they made that happen. But I have mixed feelings because, like a lot of liberals, I'm suspicious of obedience.
You just convince them to sign a deed of bondage once, then everything's procedurally liberally a-ok.
It's easy, Ogged. You ask them nicely, and then they say "OK, mama!" as they trot off to do it. Sometimes you don't even have to ask, just throw a pointed glance at the clothes they haven't yet put in the hamper. You should try it sometime.
Off to swim.
My older son might have been like that, once upon a time, then we had kid 2, the chaos agent, who fears no punishment, nor the withdrawal of parental love, and who will do, or not do, as he pleases.
Did you really try withdrawing parental love? Like for a couple of days to give it a fair chance.
I bet your wife is sneaking him love while you're not looking.
Laura Ingraham is trying to make everybody white by withdrawing her love.
WISH HER LUCK SHE'LL NEED IT. FUCKING INGRATES.
28: Even among her peers she manages to stand out as an especially horrible human being.
Because her parents loved her, she could be the best.
We don't pay for chores, but we don't really pay allowance at all, nor do we enforce chores with any rigidity. AB's put them in charge of their bathroom, and that seems to be working OK? Iris abruptly started taking care of her room once adolescence hit.
We will pay them for a specific job, like picking up black walnuts (which are otherwise a nightmare because they rot and ooze brown stain-liquid and get worms). But I'm not even sure if there are other examples. The idea is that it's a rare thing they're doing for us, not part of their normal lives (the way that e.g. dishwasher-emptying is).
My dad once made me change all the little insert-things in the law books for a whole (small) law library. I think he paid me $5/hour because he really wanted it done.
32: if you want to sell some black walnut to the MN DNR, you can totally stay at my house.
https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/forestry/nursery/cone-seed-collection.html
32 is very similar to us. Jammies will pay the kids if they're helping him in a legitimately helpful task, but it's all one-off and optional. They all share 1 room which is too small to play in and thus stays basically clean. (The main play area is chronically wrecked and they do half-assedly pick that up without pay.) No allowance.
I gave the Kid an allowance which was theoretically tied to work done (dishes and laundry) but since they almost never did the work and still kept getting the allowance anyway, I think I taught the wrong lesson.
Yes. It's bad for kids to learn how little effort and wages correlate until they've gotten out of the house.
Related: I found this story and the research it referenced interesting, but if I had kids it would probably have made me despair that I'd done everything wrong, so cw: cheerfully helpful children.
Also, not kid-related, but the topic of chores and living through other human's approaches to them reminded me of this passage in Peter Coviello's _Long Players_:
You don't stay coupled very long without learning, in cartographic detail, the many regions of your lover's intractability. Or, for that matter, your own. Had you not imagined yourself as a person who regarded dishes left unwashed in the sink as both moral outrage and calculatedly *personal* affront? Now you know.
Upon first reading it, I audibly exclaimed, "busted".
40 died in 2004, Moby, but I wouldn't be surprised if he endorsed slavery before that.
OT: I just read that wearing white, crew-neck t-shirts with an open collar is tacky. Could this possibly be true? If yes, why hasn't anybody told me at some point in the last 25 years?
Tacky? Screw that. You can have my white, crew-neck t-shirt when you peel it off my cold, pale chest!
Boy did I not get my kids successful about doing chores in any kind of organized way.
Yeah, me neither. My son has absolutely no notion of contributing to the upkeep and maintenance of a household just because he is, you know, a member of that household. Ask him to unload and reload the dishwasher (the dishwasher! that magical electrical contrivance that actually washes the dishes for you, instead of you doing them by hand...!), and it's as though you've just asked him to go underground to work in the coal mines as an underage, exploited child labourer in 19th-century Pennsylvania, or something.
That said, he does do his own laundry; and he can make himself a meal (he makes a really good milkshake, actually: though I suppose ice cream with chocolate sauce and peanut butter shouldn't really count as a meal?...); and he can clean up his bedroom when he absolutely has to (but normally his room is, in the words of LB, "a post-apocalyptic hell-scape").
xelA quite likes to be helpful, but he'll only do it if he's helping you. He wouldn't go off an do something on his own (although he will mop the floor if asked, because he likes doing it). That said, he's 5.
My parents very explicitly did not tie pocket money to chores. They brought it up a few times. My sister and I received pocket money, but chores we had to do because we were part of the household and doing so was a communal duty. It was impressed on us that they were just something we had to do, and not the proper object of a reward or payment.
We didn't do an enormous amount. We divided up the dish washing, and were responsible for tidying our own rooms. After about age 13 we did quite a lot of the cooking, and by about age 15, more than half of the cooking and food prep. But it wasn't an onerous amount. Looking back, we probably should have been asked to do more. It was just very clear that doing it was not optional, and was independent of money/reward.
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Hey ttaM, I'm coming to the UK (Oxford-Taunton-London) for a business trip in September. Have a few questions for you and dropped you an email.
And I'll be looking for a London meet-up around September 18th to the 23rd.
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I should be around for a London meet-up. Definitely. I saw your email, but I'm sitting in heavy email debt at the moment!
My sister and I received pocket money, but chores we had to do because we were part of the household and doing so was a communal duty. It was impressed on us that they were just something we had to do, and not the proper object of a reward or payment.
Pocket money is bestowed by grace, not by good works.
Similar to ttaM, allowance was small and continuous, while normal chores were just part of being part of a household. They dramatically increased when Dad remarried -- we were basically brought up to the step's level of effort, to much grumbling. When he later divorced, chores increased again -- but we were now teens and very happy to be away from the steps, so it went well.
At home, dish washing was a routine chore, under the basic rules of "those who don't cook do dishes". I was pleased to find that volunteering dish washing when visiting relatives garnered impressive amounts of praise.
It's always welcome until I drop a plate. Then it's welcome again after people figure out I'm going to drop a plate regardless of whether I'm helpful or not.
When we do big chores, like washing the porch, I like to put on "It's a Hard-Knock Life", because it cracks me up to watch children work to that song.
Who washes a porch? I never heard of that.
If I washed my porch, where would I keep my layer of grime?
OT: I noticed the headline and photo before seeing the URL. I thought the nastiest feud in science was about how pansexual dinosaurs were.
Because somehow no one else said this:
M/tch!
First M/tch, then the spammers. I don't think this is a coincidence.
Spammers making not-unreasonable points.
History is written by the winners.
Cosign 46, which was very similar to the situation when I was growing up. If you wanted to get paid for work, you could do a paper round.