"They've got enough on with school"

Leo has spelling, reading, a project on the Romans, and football on Tuesday. It seems unkind to add the bag and the bed to that. School is his work and the house is yours, and the division is tidy and it's the wrong one.

The reason it's the wrong one is that the two aren't in competition, or not in the way the belief assumes. Elizabeth White, Mark DeBoer and Rebecca Scharf used a national study of nearly ten thousand American children who started kindergarten in 2010, whose parents reported at the time how often the child did chores. Three years later, in third grade, the children rated their own competence at school, with friends, in getting on with others, and in their satisfaction with life, and sat reading, maths and science assessments. Children who'd done chores regularly at five rated themselves more competent at eight on every measure, after allowing for sex, family income and parents' education. Children who'd rarely done chores had higher odds of being in the bottom fifth on each self-rating, by around a fifth to a quarter, and those are modest odds. Chores of any frequency were also associated with slightly better maths scores. It's an association from parent and child reports and it can't show that the chores caused anything. The households where five-year-olds do chores may differ in a hundred other ways. But the direction is the opposite of the belief. The children with the jobs were not the ones falling behind.

I'd read it the way I've read everything else in this book, which is that the job is the practice. A child who's packed a bag and made a sandwich has practised holding a small plan in their head and finishing it, and that's not a different skill from the one spelling asks for. It's the same one, in a kitchen.

There's also a quieter point about what "enough on" measures. Leo's day has school in it and football and a screen. The bag takes four minutes. The bed takes two. The sandwich takes six. If those twelve minutes are what breaks him, it isn't the minutes, and a childhood with no jobs in it isn't a lighter childhood. It's one where the whole of the work is somebody else's and the child's part is to be transported between it.

None of this argues for a chore chart on the fridge with stickers, and I'd not give you one. It argues for the small jobs that are already the child's by any sensible measure, their bag, their bed, their plate, being theirs in practice and not just in name. School will be fine. School is where they're already allowed to do things badly. It's the house where they're not.