Getting Our Kids to Help Around the House

22:55Heidi Rose:Despite our best intentions and awareness of this, it is going to be if the kids are working more, the girls are working more than more. I'm not going to get into gender theory because I don't understand it. But what I see is kids help around the house in these international communities. When I look at it, it's girls who are helping around the house. And I don't know that that's a household that's appealing to me. I'm just here trying to figure it out. But I do notice that the person who most offers domestic labor in my house is my female child. Worth noting. This stuff runs deep. Although, you know what?

23:35Heidi Rose:Let me say one point of the other thing. When my kids were little, when my two boys were little and my husband had to go do something annoying like clean the garage or rake leaves, he would often call it man work. And he'd say, like, come on, boys. This is at that Michaelene Ducleff age where they're into it. He's like, come on, finish your breakfast. It's time for some man work. And then if it was like something like daddy was doing and it was outside and it involves like changing a tire or whatever, right? They were into it. They were so in. And so we were leaning into gender roles in order to encourage cooperation.

24:06Heidi Rose:But yeah, those gender roles exist. Yeah. And I think they can be useful or not useful. So I was trying to think about my garage and how to start this journey. And the biggest thing I think is that it's something that sometimes I've had very operational in my house. And sometimes I have not had very operational in my house where I'm like, I cannot deal with these teens. I'm not going to ask them to do anything because I cannot stand to fight for 40 minutes about it. But I think being very clear yourself on like, what could you use help with? What could your kids help more with? What do we want our kids to do?

24:45I think sometimes I look at other families and it's like, oh, our whole family, the kids raked all the leaves and put them in bags. So I don't do that. I would think, oh, my kids would never do that. And I know that people look at my family and think he makes a steak. You know, my kids are good at like holding doors for other people. Oh, that's so great. My kids would never do that. We go out a lot. Oh, your kids are so calm and good flying in on a restaurant. Yeah, because they've had a lot of experience because we travel all the time because our family is spread out. Don't compare yourself to other families.

25:15But like, what would it look like ideally for you to have kids who helped more around the house? What do you need help with? Right. Get clear about that. This is a step that we often skip. Right. Like it's me versus the kids. My kids are lazy. Other people's kids are good and my kids don't help. And just starting from the premise of like, what do I want help with? Now I'm going to lay a little Dr. Debra Gilboa on you, Amy. Get the behavior you want without being the parent you hate. That's the crux of it. This is our thesis, right? So let's start with learning to contribute to the needs of the family as a child produces better results for adults.

25:58People who understand their role as part of a system are better employees, friends and partners later on in life. So this is worthwhile work to undertake. Absolutely. Exactly. When we don't actually expect our children to follow through on jobs for whatever reason, we are conveying that we don't think they are capable of doing more than the minimum. We're kind of taking the walls down for them and saying, It's fine. I'll do it. I'll finish it for you. And I'll do it, we think sometimes conveys, look at how nice I'm being. But it can also convey, I don't trust you to do it. I don't think you're good enough to do it.

26:33I don't think you'll do it the right way. I think it's always worth starting on like, this is worthwhile to do because it is faster to clean the garage yourself. And nobody would complain about the music that I'm playing and that it makes me an unk. Right. But it's better for us to do it as a family.

26:48Heidi Rose:Well, that's just it. And then this starts when they're three. Like, it would be much more of a hassle to try to get this done with small kids underfoot. It's more of a hassle, which is why we don't do it. And then it turns into they're 13 and 14 and they're complaining and still more of a hassle. And somehow they haven't learned to participate. Yeah. She argues eventually our children will leave home and not know how to feed themselves and maintain a clean, pleasant environment. I absolutely think this is wrong. I went to college having no idea how to do laundry. And the first day I did laundry, I literally had to get somebody explain.

27:19My mother did the laundry for us. It was one of those things. It was in the basement. That was like mom's land. You didn't go in. And I think it's because she cared about her clothes and she didn't want us messing them up. She didn't want to do it again. Right. She didn't want all the pink clothes to deal with.

27:33Heidi Rose:Yeah. The first week of college, I had borrowed a shirt from someone. I was like, can you show me how to do laundry? I shoved everything in there. And she said, you have to separate the darks from the lights. I think this is actually becoming less true because clothes are so synthetic now that they don't tend to have this problem as much as they used to. But otherwise, the dark colors bleed onto the light. she explained it to me and she was also quite mad because I had put a white shirt of hers that I had borrowed in there and that's how I learned to do laundry and I basically never forgot it I learned in five minutes I think there's plenty of stuff as we are both launching kids into the world that we feel a little bit like did we tell them to put the cap on the steamer it will burn them like they'll figure it out you don't have to make sure they know how to do every task but you don't want them to be like, where's the person who comes and picks up my laundry?

28:25Heidi Rose:Right. They're going to learn fast. In one of my kids' cases, you go for parents' weekend and you find out my kid's room was full of fruit flies. It was such a mystery to this kid. They hadn't taken the garbage out in their first six weeks of school. Hard lesson and didn't do it again. Right. And you would never in a million years be like, if you don't take the garbage out, it's going to smell. But they might end up quite mystified. I mean, I've told the story before that I just kept writing checks the first year that I was in college because I thought it was like a credit card. You could keep writing checks and then your balance was negative$800.

28:56And then you would eventually put the money back in. I had every intention of paying it back. I wasn't stealing the stuff. And then I learned that that was a crime called check kiting that I could be indicted for. And I was like, wow, OK, kids, you can't teach them everything, but you should be including them in as much as possible. If you take them to the bank, you're like, this is how a check works, you know? And by the way, I'm so old that when was the last time anyone wrote a check? I couldn't find a check in my house at some point.

29:20Heidi Rose:But I think it's just that you don't need to be like, hey, you need to do this stuff because then your kids will never learn how to do it. Like, take that off. They should help you clean the garage because they should help you clean the garage. Assigning appropriate tasks and not calling them chores, which is very important in our house. I have a very smell sensitive kid who I believe cannot do the litter box without throwing up. That kid is not assigned to the litter box. It's not a rotating system. The kids who are more involved with the cat do the food in the litter box. I also am extremely sensitive to smells.

29:54I do not get near the cat food or the litter box. If everyone else on earth died, my cats would die because I'm not going to feed them or clean their litter box. So the people who are less sensitive to that do that, sure. But the kid who has that sensitivity does other things.

30:09Heidi Rose:Right. They don't do nothing because that's so important to them. They make it up. They make it up to be another way. Consistency with chores and maybe not calling them chores. This is part of how we operate in the house. It's not like you have a chore. Right. But I think there's something at the heart of this that is much more than sticker charts and like popsicles in different chore areas. And we're going to come right back and I'm going to tell you all about it, Amy. Hey there, I'm Kendra Adachi and my show, The Lazy Genius Podcast, helps you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't.

30:45Heidi Rose:And you get to decide what matters. I'm not here to tell you what to do. I'm here to give you a new way to see. Episodes of The Lazy Genius Podcast are full of compassionate time management tips and permission slips to do what makes sense for you. New episodes drop every Monday. Follow and listen to the Lazy Genius Podcast on the free Odyssey app or wherever you get your podcasts.

31:13And now, types of kids at chore time from the What Fresh Out Podcast. The gold star kid will help with chores regularly, but will also demand constant reassurance that they are, in fact, the best counter wiper you have ever seen.

31:30Heidi Rose:The overestimator likes to say, do I have to do everything around here whenever he is asked to pitch in? For the record, he does approximately 1 ,2745th of everything around here. The sucker will double her work efforts if you tell her that her sister is a faster carpet sweeper. The snail would love to help you match up all the socks as long as you are willing for that task to take three hours. The fakers claim to be busy upstairs cleaning their room whenever you ask them to go play outside. The gamer will work in exchange for the Wi-Fi password. The grudge holder still remembers that time three years ago when their brother got out of chores because he said he was sick, but knows he was totally faking it.

32:19Heidi Rose:The fatalist shrieks, I just made the bed yesterday. Is this all there is? Just repeating chores every day forever? Welcome to my life, kid. The Roomba. Not technically a child, but the only member of your house who does chores without complaining. This has been Types of Kids at Chore Time. From the What Fresh Hell podcast.

32:45so i've talked before about frank bruni's piece which we're going to link in this episode you should read and it's about they have a dilemma where his father who's what's called on the east coast a snowbird who spends the winter in atlanta and the summers in new york makes that drive but his father is 79 years old and his wife has either passed away or can't make the trip i can't remember His wife isn't going with them. And so his adult children are wondering out loud, how are we going to do this? Can someone take time off work? We're all very busy. And at a certain point, the 18-year-old daughter overhears this.

33:22She's finishing high school. She's like done with all her requirements. She's like, I'll go. I got nothing else to do. And so now this 18-year-old and this 80-year-old are driving together. She's taking over this task. And Frank Bruni, his writing just lights me up. He's such a great writer. But in the piece, he says his father says to him, my firstborn granddaughter, come all this way to drive me. Can you believe it? I can, says Frank Bruni, because he set this up to happen. Leslie, who's the granddaughter, is the return on an investment that he made across many decades with so much of his time and so much of his heart.

33:59and I do think that getting away from chores and getting under that you are teaching your children how to live their lives by how you live your life the ability that I now have to say to my children and I said it to my children at the time like my mom is dying and I need to be there for my mom you need to step up and help around the house and you need to not give me a hard time because I come in first this month because I'm losing my mom and it's one of the hardest things I'm going to go through. And you guys have a role in helping me in that. To me, like that's the work of chores. That's the work of like, it's connection, but they have to see you doing that work too.

34:50You know, they have to see you helping your parents. And this is the thing that I want to get at that's underneath like whether or not I can yell at my kids enough to get them to clean the garage.

35:01Heidi Rose:I have two responses to this story, which I really like this Frank Bruni story. The first is I think that there is a tendency these days like my parents would definitely have sent me at 18 to bring somebody who needed what I've offered to go. I'd like to think so, but I definitely would have done it. But today's 18 year olds are teeny tiny babies who couldn't possibly couldn't possibly do something like that. Drive a Cadillac on a highway like the interstate they barely have their permit right you have to read the article because he paints such a funny picture because he's such a talented writer it's like this giant oldsmobile cadillac whatever there just was capability presumed there was fear and there was also extreme capability i got myself back and forth from college like i don't even know how i did planes trains and automobiles because otherwise i wasn't going to get home he just figured this stuff out and now of course i'm already thinking about my kid like what about thanksgiving and should we get a plane ticket i just think we do sort of oversee our kids lives in little ways and then we presume they wouldn't be capable of a large gesture like this.

35:58Heidi Rose:And then my other thought is that when you were saying this about your kids, when my dad was dying, I had a similar conversation with my kids. And then another time I really kind of needed to like, remember I said that, like, that's still happening. We're still there. I'm still in that season. But then how do you walk that back? Maybe once they've learned that, once they've seen a parent really need support, like not just pretend I need your help with the garage, but like really need support, maybe that trickles down. Or is it something we have to figure out how to kind of walk back? Like you don't have to be in dire straits for them to help you with the garage.

36:27It's the scales, I think. And I talked to Janelle Hanchett about this on an episode long ago. And she said, you have to be careful to hand kids things that are not too heavy for them to carry. And this is the scales. Like, I don't think you can live your life in the space of like, I'm needy and you need to do everything for me. But I think if we skip telling kids that they can and will face hard things. We just have to keep rebalancing these scales. And I think that this is something you can really go back to one on. And so the end of my garage story is that I kind of sat the kids down and I said, listen, this is a space we all want to use.

37:10One of the kids really wants to use it as like a clubhouse-y space, but this is the space we all use. We all made this mess and we're all going to clean it together. Within that, because my husband stopped me from being crazy, he said to me, you have to let them do it however they do it. So one of them did it with what you would call a boo-boo face the whole time. And normally I would stop them and be like, get that boo-boo face off your face because I'm not going to say, I'm not dead. I didn't do it. I let them do the whole thing with a boo-boo face. And one of them kind of did the very least.

37:42And then at the dinner table that night, I said, that was really hard. Here's like a big chicken parm dinner that I made for everybody. We did it. Here's what I noticed. And I kind of pointed out like, listen, of course, the kid who wanted it the most did the most and helped the most and had the best attitude. The kids who wanted to do it the least helped. Like, this is what I saw. And I'm just going to reflect it back to you and do with it what you want, that information. It's not like you are a bad kid because you had a boo-boo face. And it's also fair that one kid wanted it and was enthusiastic about it.

38:15But I think being vocal about what our needs and wants are and then being vocal about and sometimes I'm the person with the boo-boo face, you know, and I'm like, listen, I screamed through that whole dinner because I was hot and I cooked all day and I felt like no one was appreciating it. And I did not need to be that reactive to what could have been a pleasant family dinner if I had calmed down for five seconds. Sometimes it's my job.

38:39Heidi Rose:It reminds me a little bit of how do we get our kids to like to read? And we kind of came down and like, we can't make them like to read. We can introduce that reading is something we do in this house. And this is the same thing. We can have a house in which you don't have to like cleaning the garage, but we do it once a year around this time of year and block out your Saturday because it's going to take as long as it takes. Here's Reem Rauda writing for CNBC. Children thrive when they feel respected, emotionally safe, and involved in the process. So she talks about shifting language, which I think is like a specificity that's not to this conversation.

39:15But instead of treating defiance or, you know, lack of wanting to participate as something we squash, we begin to see it as a signal, a call for connection, clarity, or emotional support. And this can get into a little bit of like the tweet tweet area of before we clean the garage amy i want to know how do you feel about cleaning no just go get a box and start killing raccoons that's what we're doing today you know but she says when we respond with empathy and leadership rather than control and criticism we reduce power struggles and raise children who trust us regulate themselves more easily and grow into emotionally resilient adults.

39:58Easier said than done. But I think that for this conversation, I wanted to think about the Frank Bruni of it all. Resetting for myself that the importance is the value of helping to clean the garage versus the demand to help clean in the garage. And I'm not going to punch my kids in the face to get them to do stuff, but I am going to invite and coerce their participation as meaningful members of the household.

40:30Heidi Rose:I think it makes sense. I'm thinking about the emotional intelligence conversation that we had recently, and it's being aware of their emotions. Like being a leader, the emotional intelligence people would argue is not about making sure everybody feels the same way. It's about being aware of how people feel and being able to respond to that calmly. And I think if we pull into with the like, I shouldn't have to ask you twice, like, wait, I shouldn't have to ask you at all. And getting mad about that, that they're not just listening. Believe me, I share that frustration. And by the way, I do that 10 times a week.

41:04I shouldn't have to put up with your stink face when I ask you to take the garbage out when I do it every day without being asked. And you're right.

41:12Heidi Rose:But what if the leadership comes without the control of how they feel about participating in the household? For me, that's the lesson. For other people, it may be a different lesson. I think what you just said is exactly what my husband is constantly trying to teach me. If they do it, you don't also get to control how they do it. That's my journey. Right. but for somebody else it might be I feel like I've lost the respect of my kids and now they won't listen to me it's just a back to one like this weekend maybe we're gonna sit down and get some lemonade and be like wow it's beautiful in New York it's our first sunny day it's like let's go sit outside and I want to have a chat and say so I noticed lately that I'm doing everything around here and it's making me really mad and I think I need more help and like is there a way that I'm approaching doing stuff that is turning you off?

42:04Like, how can we all get on the same side of the net and solve the fact that we have a hoarder's garage?

42:10Heidi Rose:And find your blind spots, right? Like, oh, my 16-year-old daughter can't use the snowblower. That's for boys, right? Or that's for grownups. And like, girls don't touch garbage in my house, Amy. Sorry, we don't do it. Right. I'm like, no gender roles until it's time for cats and garbage, because that's not girls work, that's boys work. Or the weird bug in the shower, right. But kids want independence. Kids want us to trust them and moving a little bit more towards the like, yeah, I'll send my 18 year old to drive your giant Oldsmobile up the highway, right? That we need to open up our minds to the freedom and the self-actualization that they kind of yearn for.

42:46Heidi Rose:There might be places that we're shutting that down and presuming they can't or won't or shouldn't do it and then they have to do the boring part instead. Yeah, and there's something interesting in what you said, which is different than what the story is, I'll send my 18-year-old. The point of his article is that the 18-year-old volunteered to go. And that's, I think, like where we want to get to. And I don't mean to say that like every time it's time to load the dishwasher, you have to sit down with lemonade outside and be like, let's talk about why we load the dishwasher. You want to get to the point where this is the natural state of your household that you can then refer to.

43:21And like, hey, I understand that going to visit the sick relative in a place that smells weird is not your idea of a good Saturday. But we do it because we're family and we try to show up for each other. And that it doesn't mean you're going to have three kids who are like always visit you in your gross nursing home when it's your turn. But it's really not about chore charts. It's about going back to one every time and being like, is the overall message of our house one that we work together to take care of each other? And I've lost it so many times. And the overall message of our house is there's an insane dictator lady who streaks at us all the time.

44:03And that's how we get stuff done. But this garage thing made me think like it's time for me and my family to go back to one a little bit and say, hey, I need more help. You guys are teenagers. You should be helping me more.

44:16Heidi Rose:Right. At some point, what you want is for somebody besides you to be the one like, oh, my gosh, we had to clean this garage out. These boxes have to be broken down. You don't want it to be you and you want to be yelling at them to do it. Amy, you're living in a fantasy land, but I love it. Yes, I would love that that was someday the outcome. But even just to be able to say like, hey, guys, it's spring and we still have Christmas ornaments under the stairs. Like, let's just take three hours this weekend and the five of us can do it in 20 minutes. All right. Let us know how it goes. We're going to keep balancing these scales all the time in my household and I'm sure your household, but I like thinking about it out loud with you and being like, yeah, this is worthwhile work.

44:52Heidi Rose:Have you signed up for our newsletter? There's a link in the show notes for this episode. You can also go to whatfreshheldpodcast.com and click the link in the sidebar to sign up. Once a month, we send you follow-ups on our favorite episodes, what our listeners have responded, and things we talk about in the episode we actually get around to for the newsletter. Like this month's newsletter has, I gave a list of the three books that I leave out around the house that my kids really laugh at and enjoy that has gotten them to read like a little more. Got to get our newsletter to see what that's about.

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