Making your kid do their chores won’t mean that they will excel at the task and actually do a good job in most cases, but it’s worth the patience as it will help them grow into successful adults.
And it’s worth the effort indeed, considering that we all have our chores no matter our age. If you teach your children to do their chores from a young age, they will be able to learn to cope with these tasks when more difficult challenges come.
Which is more, learning to do your chores means learning to build a work ethic that will reflect later in your professional environment.
The Harvard Grant Study that has spanned over 75 years has identified that success is directly related to work ethic, and the best way to help your children develop it is through nurturing one important thing:
The ‘pitch-in’ mindset
In other words, the ability to pitch in the task and stay with it until you have finished it. And for children, as Julie Lythcott-Haims notes, this mindset can be nurtured by teaching them to take responsibility for their chores as soon as possible.
“Professional success in life, which is what we want for our kids … comes from having done chores as a kid,” she explains in her 20XX TED Talk.
“The earlier you started, the better,” as this kind of mindset will help your child to grasp the challenges in life as they come. “[A] roll-up-your-sleeves- and-pitch-in mindset, a mindset that says, there’s some unpleasant work, someone’s got to do it, it might as well be me … that that’s what gets you ahead in the workplace.”
And this mindset can be learned through chores very easily. In the end, who wants to do them gladly? We just roll up our sleeves and say, “let’s do it,” because nobody else will. This is the mindset that will help your child conquer every obstacle that might occur in their adult life, and especially in their careers, where (we all know) that things can often get rough and tough.
And which is more, teaching your child to do these tasks will help them to cope with the upcoming challenges one by one instead of having to face them all at once when they start living on their own.
Of course, there’s a catch
If you think that your child will do an excellent job cleaning the floor, doing the dishes, or doing their laundry, you are in for some really big surprises. You will see some cute clumsy action and in the end, you will have to clean up yourself.
The point is not to hire your kids as your perfect helpers (although they will become ones soon enough), but to help them develop these habits gradually and learn to improve each time. And the main goal of it all (never forget) is nurturing in them the idea that there are some things that need to be done, and that they are in charge of these things right now.
As Lythcott-Haims says: “By making them do chores — taking out the garbage, doing their own laundry — they realize I have to do the work of life in order to be part of life. It’s not just about me and what I need in this moment.”
Watch her TED talk on How to Raise Successful Kids – Without Overparenting below and don’t forget to spread the awareness!
Source: Inc.
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