034: How do I get my child to do chores?
16th April 2017 • Your Parenting Mojo - Respectful, research-based parenting ideas to help kids thrive • Jen Lumanlan
00:00:00
00:42:11
Shownotes
We have a pretty cool mini-mini-series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those “chores your child could be doing” articles showing up in my social media feeds lately, and I was thinking about those as well about how children in other cultures seem to be MUCH more willing to help out with work around the house. I’m not saying we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in Western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them?
We’re going to hold off on the “getting paid” part for now, and we’ll talk about that very soon with my guest Ron Lieber, the Money columnist of the New York Times who wrote a book called The Opposite of Spoiled. But today we’re going to discuss the chores part with Andrew Coppens, who is an Assistant Professor of Education in Learning Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. If you’ve ever asked your child to do a task in the home only to have them say “No,” then get comfy and listen up, because I have a feeling that our conversation is going to surprise you and give you some new tools for your toolbox.
References:
Coppens, A.D., & Acala, L. (2015). Supporting children’s initiative: Appreciating family contributions or paying children for chores. Advances in Child Development and Behavior 49, 91-112. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2015.10.002
Coppens, A.D., Acala, L., Rogoff, B., & Mejia-Arauz, R. (2016). Children’s contributions in family work: Two cultural paradigms. In S. Punch, R.M.
Vanderbeck, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Families, intergenerationality, and per group relations: Geographies of children and young people (Vol 5). New York, NY: Springer.
Coppens, A.D., Acala, L., Rogoff, B., & Mejia-Arauz, R. (2016). Children’s contributions in family work: Two cultural paradigms. In S. Punch, R.M.
Vanderbeck, & T. Skelton (Eds.), Families, intergenerationality, and per group relations: Geographies of children and young people (Vol 5). New York, NY: Springer.
LIFE Center (2005). “The LIFE Center’s Lifelong and Lifewide Diagram.” Retrieved from: http://life-slc.org/about/citationdetails.html
Read Full Transcript
Transcript Jen: [00:37] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a pretty cool mini mini series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those Chores Your Child Should Be Doing articles showing up in my social media feeds lately and I was thinking about those as well as some of the ethnographic research that we’ve discussed on previous episodes of the podcast where I’ve read about six year olds cooking for a group of adults who were on a trip for a week and willingly helping to care for younger siblings and cleaning up around the house without being asked and as I often do when these kinds of things come up, I started to wonder why don’t our children cook meals at age six and willingly help to care for younger siblings and clean up around the house without being asked? I’m not saying that we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them? Jen: [01:29] So we’re going to hold off on the getting paid part for now and we’ll talk about that very soon with my guest, Ron Lieber, who’s the money columnist of the New York Times and wrote a book called The Opposite of Spoiled. But today we’re going to discuss the chores part with Andrew Coppens, who is an Assistant Professor of Education and learning sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Dr Coppens’ work examines how children from a number of cultural communities learn to help collaborate and how they get motivated to learn and the everyday activities of their families and communities. He’s focused on cultural practices regarding children’s everyday family contributions. What kids think about helping out and mothers ways of getting there. Children involved. If you ever asked your child to do a task in the home, only to have them say no, then get comfy and listen up because I have a feeling that our conversation is going to surprise you and also give you some new tools for your toolbox. Welcome Dr Coppens! Dr. Coppens: [02:21] Thanks. It’s really nice to speak with you. Jen: [02:22] All right, so let’s start by defining chores. What kind of work constitutes chores in your research? Dr. Coppens: [02:29] So, uh, I think we make one what seems to be a critical distinction and that seems to give us a window into a lot of cultural differences regarding how voluntarily kids do chores. And that distinction is between what we refer to as family household work, which is activities like helping with cooking a meal where other people are involved and where the benefits of doing that chore are shared across a number of people and we make that distinction be doing those kinds of activities and we call self-care chores, so things regarding my stuff, so making my bed or my mess, you know, some toys that I left out and where people tend to work in self-care chores a little bit more individually. So there’s a lot of different kinds of work around the house, but those two types tend to focus on those two types, tends to be pretty instructive. Jen: [03:21] Okay. So it’s the idea of taking care of yourself as in things like brushing your teeth and cleaning up your own mess versus something that has some kind of contribution to how the rest of the household runs? Dr. Coppens: [03:33] Yeah. And of course self care chores have a contribution because it’s something that, you know, maybe a parent doesn’t have to do if a child does it. But where the distinction becomes important. I think is what motivates the child to get involved, so family, household work, things like, uh, you know, other things like sweeping the kitchen versus just sweeping my room or helping out with all the laundry versus just folding my socks. The family household work is a bit more social. So it’s that sociality of family household work, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit more that seems to support kids’ voluntary engagement. Jen: [04:09] Okay. So you’ve alluded to my next question which is about money, which we’re only going to talk about really briefly because we will do a whole episode on that coming up in a couple of weeks. But the reason I want to talk about it is because it does seem really common in Western societies to pay children for doing chores. And I’m wondering how is this working out for parents? Because all the way back in episode seven of this podcast, we talked about how parents use some foods like vegetables as a gateway to other kinds of foods like desert and the children end up liking the vegetables less and the dessert more. And then in a subsequent episode, I think it was episode nine, we actually discussed how rewarding children with praise – but I can sort of see money as being a different kind of praise; it makes them want to do the thing right now – but as soon as the praise stops, they stopped wanting to do the thing that you praise them for. So I’m curious about how all those things that we’ve already talked about on the podcast fit together and how that is associated with the whole paying children to do chores thing and how that’s working out for parents. Dr. Coppens: [05:13] Yeah. So this is a really interesting question. In one study that a colleague of mine, Lucy Alcala and I did a regarding basically different cultural approaches to encouraging children to get involved in chores. We ask college students about their experience with receiving allowances. So an alternative to allowances might’ve been in a indigenous heritage in Mexican-American families. And what was really common among the middle class students perspectives and backgrounds and what seems to be supported by a lot of the research is that one, I think there’s a wide range of ways that kids are rewarded or ways that kids are paid for getting involved in chores and one doesn’t really seem to emerge as a clear leader in comparison to the others. So a lot of approaches to paying kids are rewarding kids for doing chores. I think fundamentally what they do is they change the meaning of the activity for kids, um, and, and make what is potentially a multidimensional activity involving social aspects involving, Hey, I get to learn how to do this sort of cool thing that adults seem to think is important that it can in the perception of kids sort of change the activity into something that’s solely about if I do this, then I get that. Dr. Coppens: [06:30] And I think that among many of the approaches of middle class families and not just in the US, this is throughout Mexico and other sort of European heritage communities. It’s that approach, it’s that basic contingency rooted approach, this, this quid pro quo assumption that is far more pervasive even if kids aren’t literally being paid or rewarded for chores. And so the alternative really removes some of these market principles from at least this particular child rearing practice all together. So removes this contingency frame completely from the equation, which I mean, if you grew up, you know, I grew up in the U.S. in middle class communities and, and that’s actually, that’s a hard thing to imagine even; those principles really pervade our lives. Jen: [07:12] And so you have studied how people in different cultures approach chores, right? So I think you looked at two different kinds of communities in Mexico. Can you tell us about those and how are they similar to and different from how Americans and people in Western cultures think about chores and children doing work around the house? Dr. Coppens: [07:31] Yeah, sure. So maybe I’ll start with an example. So I lived and worked as a teacher in rural Nicaragua for a couple of years and so in my role as a teacher, I taught in the afternoons. So this was sort of, you know, sort of cowboy country and there were dairy farms and things like that and in the small towns and so really early five in the morning, you know, kids would come running by and knocking on my door, you know, wake up, wake up, and so, so I would go to the dairy farms and just sort of hang out and watch what was going on and, and so it was really, really struck by how kids, I guess learned and how they contributed in those contexts. And so what was most striking to me is that they weren’t asked or they weren’t required or paid to be there, but, but they woke up every morning at five and were dying to do it. Jen: [08:18] Which may be surprising to the average Western parent. Dr. Coppens: [08:22] No, it was surprising. It was surprising to me in that I had those same kids in my classroom and in the afternoon and in some cases they were sort of my worst students, you know, they were just bored, you know. So, so my experience there, I, I, uh, I just became very interested in the kinds of learning and the kinds of motivation that characterize this, what we might refer to as an informal context or this sort of everyday context and how that differed from school based or maybe classroom based type. So I got really in the initiative the kids, the kids were showing in the morning and decided I wanted to go to Grad school and to learn a little bit more about that and that really built into a series of studies focused on household work in an indigenous heritage community, uh, that this is near Guadalajara and what we referred to in a cosmopolitan community, but really a middle class community with several generations of experience with formal schooling. And those studies looked at cultural differences between those two communities in how much kids were doing around the house to help. And then how voluntarily they were doing those chores. And in the indigenous heritage community, kids were both helping more extensively in a in a wide range of activities. But I was really most interested in, in the fact that they were doing that voluntarily, and in fact it seemed to be that the more voluntary contributions, the more they did, which, which again, you mentioned a sort of paradoxes, from the perspective of… Jen: [09:52] Might be shocking to Americans. Dr. Coppens: [09:55] Yeah. And, and you know, since then that’s really been my focus. Jen: [09:59] Yeah. So let’s probe on that in a variety of different ways. As I was reading your research, one thing that occurred to me that kind of seemed to be at the heart of the difference between the views of the chores in the indigenous Mexican communities that you studied compared with the more cosmopolitan communities in Mexico and also in the U.S., was that there seemed to be two very different kinds of views of what chores are in those communities. And when I think about doing chores and potentially assigning my still toddler, but she’s, she’s going to be doing chores soon, I imagine if I think about assigning work to her, it’s, it’s just saved me from doing something to free up time for myself to do something that I need to do or even that I want to do or even so that we can free up some time for the two of us to go and do something fun together. But it seemed as though, to me at least, in the indigenous community, it was almost like there wasn’t the same distinction between work and leisure and that to some extent leisure can be had by doing chores in the company of people whose company you enjoy. Am I misinterpreting that or was that kind of what you saw? Dr. Coppens: [11:05] No, I think that’s. I think that’s spot on. I think that’s a part of the picture and many of the indigenous heritage communities and I think one of the things that supports this, this permeability between what in many middle class communities is a relatively strict line between time for work and time for play or time for educational activities is the autonomy that’s afforded for two kids, for engaging in work. So this connotation that many of us grew up with and in many cases still have around household chores being sort of onorous and we’re looking to do them as efficiently as possible and so that they’re over with and we can move on to other more enjoyable things. I think part of the lack of enjoyment of that kind of work have the ability to make a contribution in a shared contribution with others is that our engagement in those when we were growing up wasn’t so voluntary. Dr. Coppens: [11:55] It was maybe coerced or it was sort of this uni-dimensional thing where we just did it for pay or to avoid punishment and sort of moved on. So in, in many of the indigenous Indian indigenous heritage communities that myself and colleagues have studied in Mexico, there is this permeable line between types of time, but I think related to that as a permeable line between really in a, in a broader sense, adulthood and childhood. So all around the world, there are adults in children that that much is pretty straightforward. But the extent to which adulthood defines a set of activities that are separate from childhood, that’s really quite a unique cultural phenomenon. And so to the extent that adults in children’s sort of social, and sort of their worlds, the worlds that they live in or defined as sort of interconnected, I think kids can, can make contributions and then seamlessly blend into playing and all of those kinds of activities are really shared by both adults and children. Jen: [13:02] Yeah. I’m thinking about when I took a trip to Guatemala, which I’m sure you would say much more elegantly than me. We took a hiking trip out of town and it was just a friend and I and a guide and they took us to this tiny village and I got up early because the kids were going to show me how to make tortillas and they were around and then they disappeared and I heard a motor running and then 20 minutes later they came back in the corn had all been pulverized and they’re making these tortillas for the family to eat that day by...
Transcript Jen: [00:37] Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. We have a pretty cool mini mini series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those Chores Your Child Should Be Doing articles showing up in my social media feeds lately and I was thinking about those as well as some of the ethnographic research that we’ve discussed on previous episodes of the podcast where I’ve read about six year olds cooking for a group of adults who were on a trip for a week and willingly helping to care for younger siblings and cleaning up around the house without being asked and as I often do when these kinds of things come up, I started to wonder why don’t our children cook meals at age six and willingly help to care for younger siblings and clean up around the house without being asked? I’m not saying that we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them? Jen: [01:29] So we’re going to hold off on the getting paid part for now and we’ll talk about that very soon with my guest, Ron Lieber, who’s the money columnist of the New York Times and wrote a book called The Opposite of Spoiled. But today we’re going to discuss the chores part with Andrew Coppens, who is an Assistant Professor of Education and learning sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Dr Coppens’ work examines how children from a number of cultural communities learn to help collaborate and how they get motivated to learn and the everyday activities of their families and communities. He’s focused on cultural practices regarding children’s everyday family contributions. What kids think about helping out and mothers ways of getting there. Children involved. If you ever asked your child to do a task in the home, only to have them say no, then get comfy and listen up because I have a feeling that our conversation is going to surprise you and also give you some new tools for your toolbox. Welcome Dr Coppens! Dr. Coppens: [02:21] Thanks. It’s really nice to speak with you. Jen: [02:22] All right, so let’s start by defining chores. What kind of work constitutes chores in your research? Dr. Coppens: [02:29] So, uh, I think we make one what seems to be a critical distinction and that seems to give us a window into a lot of cultural differences regarding how voluntarily kids do chores. And that distinction is between what we refer to as family household work, which is activities like helping with cooking a meal where other people are involved and where the benefits of doing that chore are shared across a number of people and we make that distinction be doing those kinds of activities and we call self-care chores, so things regarding my stuff, so making my bed or my mess, you know, some toys that I left out and where people tend to work in self-care chores a little bit more individually. So there’s a lot of different kinds of work around the house, but those two types tend to focus on those two types, tends to be pretty instructive. Jen: [03:21] Okay. So it’s the idea of taking care of yourself as in things like brushing your teeth and cleaning up your own mess versus something that has some kind of contribution to how the rest of the household runs? Dr. Coppens: [03:33] Yeah. And of course self care chores have a contribution because it’s something that, you know, maybe a parent doesn’t have to do if a child does it. But where the distinction becomes important. I think is what motivates the child to get involved, so family, household work, things like, uh, you know, other things like sweeping the kitchen versus just sweeping my room or helping out with all the laundry versus just folding my socks. The family household work is a bit more social. So it’s that sociality of family household work, which I’m sure we’ll talk about a little bit more that seems to support kids’ voluntary engagement. Jen: [04:09] Okay. So you’ve alluded to my next question which is about money, which we’re only going to talk about really briefly because we will do a whole episode on that coming up in a couple of weeks. But the reason I want to talk about it is because it does seem really common in Western societies to pay children for doing chores. And I’m wondering how is this working out for parents? Because all the way back in episode seven of this podcast, we talked about how parents use some foods like vegetables as a gateway to other kinds of foods like desert and the children end up liking the vegetables less and the dessert more. And then in a subsequent episode, I think it was episode nine, we actually discussed how rewarding children with praise – but I can sort of see money as being a different kind of praise; it makes them want to do the thing right now – but as soon as the praise stops, they stopped wanting to do the thing that you praise them for. So I’m curious about how all those things that we’ve already talked about on the podcast fit together and how that is associated with the whole paying children to do chores thing and how that’s working out for parents. Dr. Coppens: [05:13] Yeah. So this is a really interesting question. In one study that a colleague of mine, Lucy Alcala and I did a regarding basically different cultural approaches to encouraging children to get involved in chores. We ask college students about their experience with receiving allowances. So an alternative to allowances might’ve been in a indigenous heritage in Mexican-American families. And what was really common among the middle class students perspectives and backgrounds and what seems to be supported by a lot of the research is that one, I think there’s a wide range of ways that kids are rewarded or ways that kids are paid for getting involved in chores and one doesn’t really seem to emerge as a clear leader in comparison to the others. So a lot of approaches to paying kids are rewarding kids for doing chores. I think fundamentally what they do is they change the meaning of the activity for kids, um, and, and make what is potentially a multidimensional activity involving social aspects involving, Hey, I get to learn how to do this sort of cool thing that adults seem to think is important that it can in the perception of kids sort of change the activity into something that’s solely about if I do this, then I get that. Dr. Coppens: [06:30] And I think that among many of the approaches of middle class families and not just in the US, this is throughout Mexico and other sort of European heritage communities. It’s that approach, it’s that basic contingency rooted approach, this, this quid pro quo assumption that is far more pervasive even if kids aren’t literally being paid or rewarded for chores. And so the alternative really removes some of these market principles from at least this particular child rearing practice all together. So removes this contingency frame completely from the equation, which I mean, if you grew up, you know, I grew up in the U.S. in middle class communities and, and that’s actually, that’s a hard thing to imagine even; those principles really pervade our lives. Jen: [07:12] And so you have studied how people in different cultures approach chores, right? So I think you looked at two different kinds of communities in Mexico. Can you tell us about those and how are they similar to and different from how Americans and people in Western cultures think about chores and children doing work around the house? Dr. Coppens: [07:31] Yeah, sure. So maybe I’ll start with an example. So I lived and worked as a teacher in rural Nicaragua for a couple of years and so in my role as a teacher, I taught in the afternoons. So this was sort of, you know, sort of cowboy country and there were dairy farms and things like that and in the small towns and so really early five in the morning, you know, kids would come running by and knocking on my door, you know, wake up, wake up, and so, so I would go to the dairy farms and just sort of hang out and watch what was going on and, and so it was really, really struck by how kids, I guess learned and how they contributed in those contexts. And so what was most striking to me is that they weren’t asked or they weren’t required or paid to be there, but, but they woke up every morning at five and were dying to do it. Jen: [08:18] Which may be surprising to the average Western parent. Dr. Coppens: [08:22] No, it was surprising. It was surprising to me in that I had those same kids in my classroom and in the afternoon and in some cases they were sort of my worst students, you know, they were just bored, you know. So, so my experience there, I, I, uh, I just became very interested in the kinds of learning and the kinds of motivation that characterize this, what we might refer to as an informal context or this sort of everyday context and how that differed from school based or maybe classroom based type. So I got really in the initiative the kids, the kids were showing in the morning and decided I wanted to go to Grad school and to learn a little bit more about that and that really built into a series of studies focused on household work in an indigenous heritage community, uh, that this is near Guadalajara and what we referred to in a cosmopolitan community, but really a middle class community with several generations of experience with formal schooling. And those studies looked at cultural differences between those two communities in how much kids were doing around the house to help. And then how voluntarily they were doing those chores. And in the indigenous heritage community, kids were both helping more extensively in a in a wide range of activities. But I was really most interested in, in the fact that they were doing that voluntarily, and in fact it seemed to be that the more voluntary contributions, the more they did, which, which again, you mentioned a sort of paradoxes, from the perspective of… Jen: [09:52] Might be shocking to Americans. Dr. Coppens: [09:55] Yeah. And, and you know, since then that’s really been my focus. Jen: [09:59] Yeah. So let’s probe on that in a variety of different ways. As I was reading your research, one thing that occurred to me that kind of seemed to be at the heart of the difference between the views of the chores in the indigenous Mexican communities that you studied compared with the more cosmopolitan communities in Mexico and also in the U.S., was that there seemed to be two very different kinds of views of what chores are in those communities. And when I think about doing chores and potentially assigning my still toddler, but she’s, she’s going to be doing chores soon, I imagine if I think about assigning work to her, it’s, it’s just saved me from doing something to free up time for myself to do something that I need to do or even that I want to do or even so that we can free up some time for the two of us to go and do something fun together. But it seemed as though, to me at least, in the indigenous community, it was almost like there wasn’t the same distinction between work and leisure and that to some extent leisure can be had by doing chores in the company of people whose company you enjoy. Am I misinterpreting that or was that kind of what you saw? Dr. Coppens: [11:05] No, I think that’s. I think that’s spot on. I think that’s a part of the picture and many of the indigenous heritage communities and I think one of the things that supports this, this permeability between what in many middle class communities is a relatively strict line between time for work and time for play or time for educational activities is the autonomy that’s afforded for two kids, for engaging in work. So this connotation that many of us grew up with and in many cases still have around household chores being sort of onorous and we’re looking to do them as efficiently as possible and so that they’re over with and we can move on to other more enjoyable things. I think part of the lack of enjoyment of that kind of work have the ability to make a contribution in a shared contribution with others is that our engagement in those when we were growing up wasn’t so voluntary. Dr. Coppens: [11:55] It was maybe coerced or it was sort of this uni-dimensional thing where we just did it for pay or to avoid punishment and sort of moved on. So in, in many of the indigenous Indian indigenous heritage communities that myself and colleagues have studied in Mexico, there is this permeable line between types of time, but I think related to that as a permeable line between really in a, in a broader sense, adulthood and childhood. So all around the world, there are adults in children that that much is pretty straightforward. But the extent to which adulthood defines a set of activities that are separate from childhood, that’s really quite a unique cultural phenomenon. And so to the extent that adults in children’s sort of social, and sort of their worlds, the worlds that they live in or defined as sort of interconnected, I think kids can, can make contributions and then seamlessly blend into playing and all of those kinds of activities are really shared by both adults and children. Jen: [13:02] Yeah. I’m thinking about when I took a trip to Guatemala, which I’m sure you would say much more elegantly than me. We took a hiking trip out of town and it was just a friend and I and a guide and they took us to this tiny village and I got up early because the kids were going to show me how to make tortillas and they were around and then they disappeared and I heard a motor running and then 20 minutes later they came back in the corn had all been pulverized and they’re making these tortillas for the family to eat that day by...