The mistakes parents make with chores

Shooing young children away from the kitchen and the laundry can have a lasting effect.

Excerpt: "Each September at the Montessori school I run, the preschoolers engage in an elaborate after-lunch cleanup routine. They bustle through the room with sweepers and tiny dustpans, spreading crumbs all over the floor and making a bigger mess than they started with. If any scraps do make it into their dustpans, most of them spill out as the children exuberantly walk to the trash bin.

It would be faster and neater to simply let the teachers do all the tidying up. But our goal is more than achieving a spotless classroom; it’s also helping children develop motor skills, responsibility, confidence, and the ability to clean effectively on their own. Sure enough, by December, the children’s sweeping efforts become more refined. By springtime, if not earlier, they start to pick up other messes throughout the day without a teacher’s prompting. They haven’t just learned to mop and scrub; they’ve taken ownership over their environment.

Contrast this with my own house—where, in a half-hearted effort to encourage my children to take responsibility for our home, I’ve been known to say, “You live here!” as they ignore the pile of dishes in the sink. After years in Montessori classrooms, I assumed that a culture of taking responsibility would develop spontaneously in my family.

And it might have, had I not made some early mistakes. When my oldest daughter, as a toddler, stirred pancake batter out of a bowl, I wrested the spoon from her hand. When my son made an earnest effort to fold a pair of pants by himself, I immediately refolded them more neatly. After those moments, and countless other small ones like them, my kids’ enthusiasm to help started to dwindle.

As the researchers I spoke with told me, this pattern is common among parents who, in an effort to make chores more efficient, unwittingly thwart their child’s desire to help."