Remember when you were a kid and your evenings and weekends were spent doing chores like drying the dishes, cleaning your room, raking the leaves, scrubbing the toilet and whatever else your parents could think of having you do the second you opened your mouth and said, “I’m bored”?
According to some anthropologists, those days are over. Kids in middle-class American families have become complacent; they expect their parents to do everything for them. And why do they expect their parents to do everything for them? Well, because their parents do everything for them!
Anthropologists from the University of California, Los Angeles, including Elinor Ochs, have spent years studying families from Samoa to the Peruvian Amazon region, but when they turned their attention toward families here in the United States, what they found shocked them. While kids in other parts of the world work alongside their parents, kids in this country have parents whose intense focus on them means they often don’t do anything for themselves at all.
The results are written about in A Field Guide to the Middle-Class U.S. Family in the Wall Street Journal. The article is fascinating and I highly recommend you read all of it, but here’s a small excerpt:
How kids develop moral responsibility is an area of focus for the researchers. Dr. Ochs, who began her career in far-off regions of the world studying the concept of “baby talk,” noticed that American children seemed relatively helpless compared with those in other cultures she and colleagues had observed.
In those cultures, young children were expected to contribute substantially to the community, says Dr. Ochs. Children in Samoa serve food to their elders, waiting patiently in front of them before they eat, as shown in one video snippet. Another video clip shows a girl around 5 years of age in Peru’s Amazon region climbing a tall tree to harvest papaya, and helping haul logs thicker than her leg to stoke a fire.
By contrast, the U.S. videos showed Los Angeles parents focusing more on the children, using simplified talk with them, doing most of the housework and intervening quickly when the kids had trouble completing a task.
In 22 of 30 families, children frequently ignored or resisted appeals to help, according to a study published in the journal Ethos in 2009. In the remaining eight families, the children weren’t asked to do much. In some cases, the children routinely asked the parents to do tasks, like getting them silverware. “How am I supposed to cut my food?” Dr. Ochs recalls one girl asking her parents.
The answer, of course, is for the little girl to go get her own silverware, but that honestly never occurred to her to do. While focusing on the children is good and appropriate, it becomes a problem when these kids stop learning self-reliance. If they never do for themselves, they quite simply never learn to do for themselves.
I’m curious though, how are chores handled in your household? (I’ll go first: my 13-year-old’s regular chores are cleaning her room, the kitchen and the bathrooms and making dinner a few times a week. She gets $10 a week and a data plan on her cell phone for all of it. )