The Parental Wheel: or, Why Doing Chores Isn't Slavery, for Crissake

I recently read somewhere that only 28% of modern American children are required by their parents to perform chores around the house. This figure is down from something like 82% just a few decades ago. The decline is so steep, and has occurred so rapidly, that a number of parents have taken to posting pictures of their kids performing household tasks to show their commitment to teaching their little ones responsibility, and many of these images have gone viral. As is always the case nowadays however, the images have provoked a backlash.

"Are you raising a slave?" Wrote one of many irate trolls lurking in the comments section. "Did you have children to take care of the things that you don't want to do around the house?"

The idea that teaching children to do chores is selfish, or even abusive, is so patently ridiculous that it would seem to require no ridicule: the position makes fun of itself. And yet we live in an age where absurd and sub-moronic notions are not only taken seriously by large segments of our population, they are enforced by social pressure and even, in some cases, law. Now, I don't normally use this platform as a chance to weigh in on social issues. You'll notice that I haven't once mentioned politics here, despite the fact that we are presently engaged in an election race that may prove critical to the future of the country we all share. People need refuges from the ceaseless flood of criticism and vitriol that pours out of the Internet every day, and I flatter myself that some of the random topics I've discussed here -- everything from ghost stories to essays on writing techniques -- have provided a few people with moments of much-needed distraction from, well, all of that shit. But this is something I felt compelled to talk about, because it brings a much larger problem with our society into specific relief.

America has forgotten how to deal with kids.

I'm not sure precisely when this began to happen, but I remember one particular incident, which took place during my second time in graduate school, when the problem asserted itself into my consciousness in a subtle yet very direct way. The class was discussing The Wizard of Oz (the novel, not the film), and I made a passing remark that I thought Dorothy was quite the uppity little snark for a girl of ten or so, raised on a farm at the turn of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. One of the other students, a parent, took exception to this. She stated that children of Dorothy's age were very difficult; she exampled having to use the promise of chocolate cookies just to get her own young daughter to put on her shoes.

I started laughing. "That may be your parenting technique, and it may fit the era we live in, but I assure you that in 1900, on a farm in the Midwest, children did not get cookies for putting on their shoes."

This statement did not endear me to many people in the classroom but it was the stark and simple truth. The rule on American farms, going back to Colonial times, was, "You don't work, you don't eat." This applied especially to children. They were expected to aid in the farm work as soon as they could walk, and they were not rewarded for their aid. They were simply punished for slacking, and "punishment" was often ferocious.
There was neither negotiation nor bribery involved. You didn't work, you didn't eat, and in place of food you got a belt over the butt. Sometimes with the buckle still attached. I should add that this attitude was not limited to farms. Kids were walloped, starved and worked like stevedores as a matter of course almost everywhere. In many cases it was a habit brought over from the Old Country, in others it was simply a matter of survival. "Spare the rod and spoil the child" was probably the most common maxim of the poor, working, and middle classes in America for 250 years or more.

When this began to change is a matter of some figuring.
Certainly if you look at the early-middle history of this country -- indeed, well into the 1900s -- our children were, if anything, treated with severity that often crossed the border into outright brutality. Child labor of the most bestial type was not formally ended in the U.S. until 1938, and as late as 1944, a 14 year-old boy was executed by the State of South Carolina for his alleged participation in a robbery. Federal laws to curtail child abuse did not exist prior to 1974, and the line between physical discipline, such as spanking, and physical abuse that left kids with black eyes, broken teeth and even internal injuries, was blurry and indistinct. As late as my college years I remember friends and fraternity brothers discussing the whuppings they'd taken from their dads -- some of which continued into their late teens. And while this sort of thing was hardly universal, it was common enough that no one regarded it with surprise.

At the same time, I think it fairly evident that two successive generations of parents, rather than newfound laws, put paid to the old, harsh, disciplinary model of raising children. Those raised in the 50s and 60s, who had their own children in the 70s and early 1980s, had a much different attitude toward kids than their own parents did. The standard of living in the United States was unprecedentedly high, America was no longer an agricultural nation, child labor had been abolished and mandatory schooling sucked up the now-unemployable kids, relieving the parents of the necessity of being with them all day. What's more, capitalism had begun to actively encourage the indulgence of children via the buying of toys and certain foodstuffs specifically designed to please children. The 60s -70s were in any case a time of social unrest, where traditional models of behavior were being rejected wholesale. The very notion of punishment in the criminal justice system was being replaced with "rehabilitation," and popular culture began to question even fundamental concepts, like patriotism, sexual morality and gender roles. A softening of attitudes on children was inevitable and probably beneficial in many ways, but the successive generation -- those who had children in the later 1980s and afterward -- continued this trend into an extreme which does not seem to have found its limit. How else can we explain the idea that forcing children to do something as harmless as household chores is exploitative, or even abusive? How else can we explain why prosaic pictures of kids mopping floors, doing dishes and taking out the trash are going viral?

When I was a kid I was regarded by many of my friends as having the easiest and most luxurious deal of anyone in my own little peer group, even though by economic standards my family was probably slightly less well-off than many of our neighbors. This was, in part, because the household chores I was expected to perform (in tandem with my brother) included only taking out the trash, shoveling snow, raking leaves, mowing the lawn, helping to unload the groceries, and periodic (and reluctant) assistance with other forms of house and yard work. I never had to do the laundry, and I was never called upon to perform the unholy grail of childhood chores -- the dishes. I'm pretty sure I wasn't even asked to make my own bed. Nevertheless I felt horribly oppressed and put-upon, a veritable martyr among suburban boys. Growing up just outside Washington, D.C., where we moved from Chicago when I was five, I experienced the extreme distinctiveness of the seasons as they exist in the Mid-Atlantic states. During three of those four seasons I was constantly at work (so it seemed at the time) battling the elements on behalf of my family. When I think of my childhood it cannot be separated from memories of shoveling endless amounts of snow from walkways and our horrifically steep driveway of rough-hewn concrete; mowing the lawn with a WW-2 era push-mower that had no engine; and raking enormities of leaves -- an especially odious task when they were soaked through by icy rains, which rendered each lawn bag as heavy as a human body. I also remember an especially Vietnam-like chore, scraping away incorrectly-applied wallpaper from about a third of the house, which took literally years to complete. And with all this, and much more, I was ridiculed as having it "soft" compared to many of my friends and schoolmates, many of whom were expected to handle all this, plus even the most minute household cleaning tasks -- vacuuming, sweeping, mopping, dish-duty, you name it. As for the kids who took part-time jobs at twelve, or helped out, unpaid, with their fathers' construction or painting businesses -- forget it. I was not even a joke to these guys. I was the sort of effeminate, weak, flabby-faced aristocrat that got beheaded in droves come the French Revolution.

Now, I hated doing chores, avoided them whenever possible and half-assed them at any opportunity. If I sweat blood dragging those 100-lb piles of leaves up the hill and over the yard to the curb, it was only because I neglected to rake the fucking things until after the rains had saturated them. If my shins stung for days after I used the weed-whacker on the crab grass around the front steps, it was only because I waited to trim said grass until it was a foot high. If I got poison ivy helping my father and brother do yard work, the faint spray of rash I got over part of my belly (which didn't even itch) was trifling compared to the hideous purple blotches that broke out over their entire bodies. I was lazy, I was selfish, and I saw little hypocrisy in dragging feet while unloading the groceries and then demanding to know why dinner wasn't ready on time. In short, I was a typical suburban baby-of-the-family, who would have most definitely benefited from a strict policy of "don't work, don't eat."
Yet the chores I was expected to do, which were regarded as extremely modest during the 70s and 80s, are evidently regarded by many today as a form of parental selfishness, even slavery.

I find this both incredible and disheartening in the extreme, for I know my parents weren't hard enough on me, nor I on myself, and indeed, I knew it at the time, especially when I saw the adult self-sufficiency of so many of my schoolmates. When I arrived at college, at the just-minted age of eighteen, and I discovered, in very short order, the things I could not do, it was appalling and humiliating. I could not use a hot pot. I did not know how long it took to cook macaroni or even precisely how to do it. I didn't understand the difference between bleach and detergent. I couldn't get dishes cleaned properly. I didn't know how to open a bank account or use an ATM card. I couldn't use any tools aside from a hammer or screwdriver, and those badly. I could not even pump my own gas. And to my surprise there were others even more helpless than I. Not many, but a few: guys that couldn't keep jobs on the grounds crew because they couldn't get a power-mower started, or replace the blade on a weed-whacker, or shovel snow without damaging the concrete beneath it. It didn't take the genius of Sherlock Holmes to deduce they had even softer upbringings than I did. And I noticed, too, that these types were just the sort to quit the fastest when the going -- any going -- got rough.

By the time I was twenty I had taught myself the basics of adult living, and even took pleasure (alas, so short-lived!) in grocery shopping and writing and mailing bills, because it made me feel so grown up. Then I went to work for a country club and discovered what children who have absolutely no sense of responsibility are like. I could write an entire blog on that experience, but I'll just say that the children of Columbia Country Club made a terrific argument for the retroactive abortion. They were monsters. The rudest, brattiest, nastiest, most selfish and entitled little shits I had ever come across. Not one of them had ever raked leaves, mowed a lawn, shoveled snow, washed dishes, done their own laundry, taken out the garbage or helped cook dinner. Not one of them was subjected to any meaningful form of discipline or had any sense of the value of money or hard work. They made me, at the same age, look like fucking Oliver Twist. And none of their parents were concerned by this or even necessarily aware of it. It doesn't take much imagination to see what kind of adults they became -- or what kind of children they bore. The results are all around us.

I freely admit that I learn life lessons with pathetic slowness, but over the course of time I began to understand to the fullest degree the value of having expectations set upon me at a young age. The old saw that chores "build character," which I ridiculed mercilessly when I was a boy, is in fact literally true. Unless you have sweat yourself, you do not know the price of sweat. Unless you have worked for your money, you won't know its value. And unless you have been taught to perform a task yourself, you will never know how hard it is nor enjoy the feeling of quiet pride that you can in fact perform it. Your expectations will be unrealistic and your ability to appreciate anything diminished. My only regret -- now -- about all that mowing, raking and shoveling is that I didn't do more of it.

The key word in that statement is "now." Probably no child enjoys doing chores. Probably no child actually appreciates the lessons they are being taught by doing them, either. This is entirely irrelevant, but somehow as a nation been conditioned to believe that if a kid is unhappy, if he is throwing a tantrum or crying or has a quivering underlip, that somehow his parents have failed -- as if their only duty was to appease, rather than to raise, their baby! God knows parenthood must be appallingly difficult, but the basic idea behind parenthood could not be simpler: raise your kids so that they become responsible adults. And the best way of doing this is inculcating them with the value of work and the necessity of personal accountability. I have never been a parent, but in addition to working at that wretched country club I have been a parole officer, and I can tell you emphatically what happens to those who do not understand that the world doesn't revolve around them. And this is precisely what our society has forgotten. We have gone to such ridiculous lengths to re-invent the parental wheel that we've abandoned the first order of parental business, which is that kids learn by example. Weak, indulgent parenting leads to weak, self-indulgent children. Tough love, in the form of chores and -- gasp! -- discipline, is a case of long-term benefit, of watering an acorn now so that years later it grows into an oak and not, as is so often the case nowadays, a pussy willow.