When you ask your child to perform a task or a household chore, are you faced with reluctance and unwillingness? Do you find yourself nagging them, only to end up ‘giving in’ and performing the task yourself? Or do you get so frustrated that you try and bribe your child into helping out with promises of treats and rewards?

Well, we found this great article that shows how this is as counterproductive for us as it is for our children, as we are failing to teach them the basic ‘survival skills’ needed to navigate their way through adult life.

Every parent wants their child to grow up to be a responsible and caring member of society. But like every other skill, responsibility is best learned from an early age so that it becomes second nature, which is where we as parents come in, easing our children into helping contribute to family life in an active, caring, sharing and empathic way. Various studies have shown that children who perform chores are far more likely to grow up to be successful (in all senses of the word) adults.

Yet sadly, whereas chores were once part of daily life, today’s kids are becoming more disenfranchised by being left off the chores list. And if they do perform chores, the likelihood is that it will be perceived to be a negative task, only made bearable through payment or other forms of bribery. This reluctance to play a part in daily household life seems to be unique to the West.

Benefits of doing chores:

Motivation and emotion – in the past, parents would allow their children to practice, under supervision, some of the basic life skills from hunting, to cooking and caregiving. In this way, the child would acquire through their experience, crucial tools such as judgement, self-control, and the core values that are so necessary for their increasingly independent interaction with the real world during adolescence.

But if the only goal-setting that children learn is related to school, they will soon find themselves at sea the moment they try to leave the nest. While they may well have achieved considerable wisdom intellectually, they will be very immature when it comes to basic ‘survival’ skills, be they practical or social.

Chores have the advantage of honing children’s large and fine motor skills as well as developing their ability to think in the abstract.

Here are five tips that you can use to encourage your children to contribute to family life:

1. Resist the urge to try to do everything for them, even if you think that you can do a better job. Remember, we all have to start somewhere, and the best way for our children to learn, and emotionally mature, is by us allowing them to make mistakes.

2. When our children express an interest in helping us, we must encourage this by giving them age-appropriate chores. So, young children could tidy away their toys after they’re finished playing with them, and older children could be tasked with putting away the shopping after a trip to the supermarket.

3. Remember, it’s important to praise your child for the effort that they’ve made, regardless of whether they performed the task well. It’s about teaching them to recognise that the effort that they put in is far more important than the end result. This will encourage them to keep trying even if they aren’t always successful in what they do.

4. If children see you taking a ‘fun’ approach to household chores, they are more likely to follow your lead. So, try and take a ‘Whistle While You Work’ approach to the task at hand, to set a good example to your children.

5. Most importantly, we should never ever bribe our children into doing chores by offering them a financial incentive or other kind of reward. As adults, we frequently have to do things that we don’t want to without reward, and often without thanks. So, if we teach our children to only behave when a reward is on offer, then we are failing to prepare them for the demands of adult life.

Intrinsic motivation comes when three needs are realised:

• Competence (sense of being able to achieve something)
• Relatedness (being able to relate to, and care for, others)
• Autonomy (the feeling of being in control of your own actions)