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NO ONE, AND I really mean no one, is more full of hope than the parent who has just pulled together a new chore chart.
‘This is it’, they think to themselves, ‘this is the one that will change our lives’. But here’s the thing, it won’t. It’s not going to work. No one is coming to help you. Save yourself the effort and the printer ink.
Now look, I can appreciate the vision. The kids are off school for Summer, so it makes sense that they take on a little extra work around the house. But you can’t underestimate the capacity that your child has to continuously find new and inventive ways to not help.
There is nothing like coming home from a long day in the office to a teen who has spent the day lounging between the couch and her bed while staring at screens of various sizes and still being met with a dramatic head fling-back and eye-roll when you ask them to do the most basic of chores. This is how my eldest daughter responds to every request.
We actually have this hilarious game we play a few times a week, where I spot our kitchen bins overflowing and tut loudly. ‘I must call the girl who does the bins’ I say, as I take my phone out and hit call, ‘I can’t believe she just left them like this again, it’s just not good enough’.
My daughter’s phone starts to ring because she is the girl who does the bins, well, she is the girl who is supposed to do the bins, but mostly she is just the girl who will balance another empty carton of milk on top of the pile and walk away.
Anyway, she will roll her eyes and sigh heavily at my call, sometimes she will look me dead in the eye as she swipes me off to voicemail, and then I leave a full voice message outlining how bad the bins have gotten. I find it very amusing and think it’s a healthy way to vent some of the frustration I feel. She doesn’t laugh, but that’s OK, I enjoy it enough for both of us. I am relentless, she is unbothered, the cycle continues.
The cycle is that I have a regular meltdown over the sheer volume of jobs that need to be done, the kids use a variety of tactics to utterly repel any progress, and then we rinse and repeat. So, my question today is, what are you guys doing? Who is doing the chores in your house? I’ve tried everything, so if you are going to say that your kids are splitting the housework equitably and without any fuss, I am sorry, but you are lying. There is no way that’s true. Also, can I live with you?
Chore charts are a scam because what they don’t tell you is that someone has to manage the entire process. So instead of reducing your jobs, you now have another thing that needs to be done. A few more things, actually, because you have to firstly show them how to do the job, then you have to monitor their progress and encourage every step of the way with a whole pile of enthusiasm that you definitely don’t feel, before finally deciding if it has been done to standard, and then enforcing an outcome. You have to be the judge, jury and executioner. So, while a single job might come off my list, the overall level of work that goes into it just doesn’t balance out.
It’s like having an entirely inept employee who doesn’t even want the job in the first place, can’t/won’t do the work, refuses to co-operate with co-workers and leaves the break room in absolute chaos. They are also openly hostile to criticism and will refuse any kind of feedback.
My younger daughter, the Queen of weaponised incompetence herself, uses a different tactic for the same result. I asked her to clean the bathroom last week, and she threw out everything cluttering the sink, including all four toothbrushes and my very expensive face wash.
If she unloads the dishwasher, she will leave a cup-avalanche balanced precariously on the very edge of the press, ready for the next unsuspecting person to open (usually me). She cleaned out the car last month, left the internal light on and drained the battery, and she has been known to put entire loads of dirty laundry into the dryer instead of the washing machine, creating her own rancid version of a scent diffuser. Yet this same child can recall every single chore ever given to herself and her sister and keeps an internal tally spanning back years that she can recite during any negotiation.
And still, we persevere. I am eternally optimistic that one day it will all click with them. They will realise that they spend more time avoiding the job than if they had just completed it in the first place.
I made one daughter the ‘Bin Manager’ and the other daughter ‘Bathroom Manager’, thinking that promoting them to management level might help. I thought that they would then take full responsibility, see when the job needs to be done and do it before they are asked.
I thought they would have a full line of sight, start to finish, and just let me know when they need new materials like bin bags or cleaning products to be ordered. I was very naïve.
All that happened was that I am now the Bin & Bathroom CEO and other colleagues (my partner) come to me to report when they haven’t been done, and then I get to have a 45-minute argument about a five minute job, and ultimately I am left with more work than we started out with initially, and a little less sanity.
This leaves us in the awful hellscape that is ‘it’s easier to just do it myself’, which, not to be dramatic, but I have to reject with every fibre of my being.
Where am I going wrong? What is the answer? Does it get easier? Do I need to do more shouting? More threatening? More bribing? I am open to all ideas, just, please, not another chore chart.
Margaret Lynch is a mother of two and is parenting columnist with The Journal.
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