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In praise of child labor

Wednesday, Nov. 16, 2005

‘‘Hey, I saw your daughter mowing the lawn!”

People have said this to me several times in the past few years, as if they’d witnessed some cultural oddity that should be taped for television. A teenage girl mowing her family’s lawn? It’s as if they saw our cat driving the car.

Alyssa is now away at college, and she’s noticed something about her peers: Many of them don’t seem to have handled a lot of chores at home. For some of the young adults who are smart enough to attend this $5 million-a-year university, walking into the laundry room with dirty clothes and a bottle of detergent presents a challenge never before faced by mankind. One student’s mommy came to do the laundry for him.

This isn’t as unusual as we’d like to think. It is one of the ways our children suffer from our affluence.

If you’re like me, you had a lot of family responsibilities when you grew up: from setting the table and washing dishes to raking leaves, shoveling snow and cleaning bathrooms. Maybe you cared for younger siblings or painted the house.

You might even tell your kids annoying stories about how tough you had it so they can appreciate how easy life is for them – stories like, ‘‘I walked to school two miles uphill both ways.” My best tale of hardship comes from when a hurricane knocked down our Weeping Willow when I was 14. Because the yard was my responsibility, I chopped up the tree myself – with a manual saw and a hand axe. It took a week.

We all learned several important lessons from such experiences. First, befriend people who own chainsaws. Second, our ridiculous parents were right: Having chores is good for a young person. It builds good work habits. Builds discipline. Builds character.

A common observation among professionals who work with youth is that they respond well to having real responsibilities that matter. That means duties they own that bring natural consequences if they slip. They don’t have clean clothes, the dog doesn’t eat or the house looks too embarrassing to invite anyone over. That’s more powerful than getting scolded by dad, although let’s not throw out scolding.

Nevertheless, I’m not the only parent around here who sees that a lot of middle class kids have been liberated from meaningful family responsibilities.

When Alyssa was in high school, many of her friends were puzzled that she had to take out the garbage before going to school on Friday mornings and vacuum the house before going out on Saturday nights. Alyssa noted that many of her peers had almost no such responsibilities. To her credit, she said this not as a complaint, but in amazement that they weren’t being prepared for the independence they craved.

I can’t say Alyssa embraced every chore. To this day, the idea of raking leaves makes her eyes grow tired and her legs grow weak. But she’s glad she knows how to take care of herself; she’s been doing her own laundry, for instance, since middle school.

Even when kids do have such real responsibilities, well-intentioned parental sexism often interferes. Boys are routinely freed from doing their laundry, and girls from moderate muscle work, like mowing lawns. Show me a girl who does yard work and changes a flat tire, and I’ll show you a woman who isn’t so dependent on men.

Besides, having children share significant household duties takes some of the physical, mental and financial load off their parents – making us less stressed, which is a relief to everyone in the family. When I see a professional service routinely doing the lawn at a household with teenagers, I think: Isn’t that what kids are for?

OK, I suppose it’s good that we’ve evolved from the days when a main reason for reproducing was to create free labor. But have we evolved so far that we can give our kids cell phones, but not the lessons learned from important — even difficult — family and personal responsibilities?

Adults frequently say that one benefit to being more affluent than their parents is that they can provide a better life for their children than they had themselves. If that better life renders a child incapable of cleaning his socks, then maybe we need pay cuts.

When our children are little, we nag them to clean their hands. I also want them to get their hands dirty.

Patrick Boyle is editor of Youth Today, the national newspaper on youth work. He can be reached at pboyle@youthtoday.org.