Parenting September 2025: Silly Parents, Chores are for Kids!
Living With Children by John Rosemond
"Living With Children" by John Rosemond
September 2025 Issue
Q: In certain of your books, you have written that children as young as 3 years old should be doing daily chores around the home. Exactly what chores are reasonable for that age child?
A: First, a personal anecdote: My mother kept a scrapbook of my early years that contained photos, notes, and other such memorabilia. Browsing through it one day, I found a photograph she had taken with her Brownie camera of me washing the kitchen floor in our tiny apartment on Church Street in Charleston, South Carolina. On the reverse side of the photo, Mom had written a date indicating that I was 3 years and 6 months old at the time.
When I asked her about it, Mom told me I enjoyed doing housework and that teaching me to wash a floor had been straightforward and easily accomplished. She also emphasized that she had held me to a fairly high standard. If I did a sloppy job of floor-washing, she had me do it over again. Such was “parenting”—though, it was known simply as “childrearing” back then—before it became necessary to clap and squeal over anything a child did to ensure the continuing inflation of self-esteem.
My training in proper husband-hood continued. By age 5, before I started first grade (kindergarten was not universal in SC in the early 1950s), I was occasionally washing my own clothing in Mom’s “washing machine,” which consisted of a large, galvanized tub with hand rollers bolted to it. And again, there were enforced standards. “Do it right the first time, and you won’t have to do it again,” became my motto.
The point of this reminiscence is that young children are more capable than most folks, apparently, think them to be. I was not a chore-savant at 3. I was simply trained properly, which is to say, patiently but with calm insistence that I do the job to the best of my ability. Let’s face it, washing a floor is about as basic as it gets. Dip sponge, wring, put on floor, wipe, dip, wring, etc. Besides, my mother’s purpose was not to have me do the job as well as she would have done it, but to teach me a fundamental citizenship skill, as well as the value of a clean and tidy environment. As we Boomers were told (but few children, these days, hear), “Good citizenship begins in the home.” As for washing clothes in a tub, it was a simple matter of grabbing two handfuls of fabric and rubbing them together until the grass stains were eradicated. Again, not complicated.
My lessons in home management continued after Mom’s remarriage. One summer, at age 12, I painted our split-level home. Thankfully, we were then living in a Chicago suburb where it was not quite as humid as Charleston, and my water, courtesy of an actual refrigerator-freezer (as opposed to the Charleston ice box), was iced. (One of my more vivid early memories is the regular visits of the iceman with his tongs.)
Teaching children that there is no such thing as a free lunch, that consumption must be balanced with contribution, is essential to the maintenance of a civil society. I can’t quite wrap my head around thinking one’s youngster is a genius and yet expecting virtually nothing from him. After all, one truly respects a child by expecting, reasonably, of him.
Q: Concerning chores, another expert recommends giving a child a certain number of chips, like poker chips, every month, and if he or she fails to do a chore or doesn’t do it properly, you take a chip away. The chips can be used to purchase clothes and other things the child wants but doesn’t necessarily need. The child can also make up lost chips by doing extra chores. My wife and I are searching for a way to get our kids, ages 6 and 9, to do some light lifting around the house. What do you think of this system?
A:I’m not for paying children to assume responsibility in the home. A child of capable age (beginning around 3) should be carrying his or her fair share of household responsibilities. The chores in question should be done because the child is a member of the family, period. Tying chores to reimbursement creates the impression in the child’s mind that he isn’t obligated to do his chores if he doesn’t want, at least for the time being, the reimbursement that’s being dangled in front of him.
Today’s parents are generally uncomfortable with exercising what I call a “Because I said so” authority in the home. That hesitation/aversion traces back to early-1970s parenting pundits like psychologist Thomas Gordon, author of one of the best-selling parenting books of that decade. Gordon maintained that parents who adhere to a traditional parenting model will inflict apocalyptic psychological damage upon their children.
Gordon’s contentions, none of which were supported by research or historical evidence, were taken up by the entire mental health professional community. Aided by the mainstream media, Gordon and his disciples completely altered America’s approach to childrearing. Fifty years into this social engineering experiment, it should be obvious that the paradigm shift in question has been nothing but bad for children, families, schools, and culture.
“Because I said so” authority is nothing less than legitimate as affirmed by the fact that since the paradigm shift in question—from “Because I said so” to “Will you do it, okay?”—every marker of positive mental health in children has declined, and significantly so. The children who are doing the best—emotionally, socially, and educationally—are those whose parents are not playing by the new rules, which boil down to “Keep your children happy at all cost.”
My wife and I awakened to common sense—which had been coaxed into submission during my graduate school experience—when our kids were 10 and 6. One expression of our revived common sense found two children who had been on “family welfare” doing nearly all of the housework and for no reason other than we told them, in no uncertain terms, they were going to do it.
Did they like the new regime? Absolutely not! They complained bitterly. But they did their chores and they will tell you today that their household responsibilities were indispensable to their successful adulthoods.
By the way, when one of our children asked, “Why do I have to do this stuff?” we answered, “So that you will have that much more reason to leave home when it’s time.” And they did!
John Rosemond is an American columnist, public speaker, family psychologist and author on parenting. His weekly parenting column is syndicated in approximately 225 newspapers, and he has authored 15 books on the subject. His ideas revolve around the ideas of authority for the parents and discipline for children. For more information, visit www.johnrosemond.com and www.parentguru.com. © Copyright 2025,