Forget money: train your children to enjoy doing jobs around the house
It is one of the principles of idle parenting that from as early an age as possible, say, three, the children will be forced to help around the house. Children are naturally busy creatures, and parents are naturally lazy, so to me it makes sense for the kids to do the work.
The problem is, they seem to like certain forms of work and dislike others. My children, for example, love nothing more than to help me stuff envelopes. Every six months or so, I send 500 copies of The Idler magazine to our subscribers. The children look forward to this moment for weeks in advance, and will sit patiently inserting magazines, sticking on stamps and making neat piles of jiffy bags in the sitting-room for more than an hour.
Our youngest child loves to go outside and do “jobs”, which generally means moving piles of matter from one place to another with his toy tractor. Sometimes I can enlist his help to do something genuinely useful, such as bring in the logs.
So far, so good. Child labour, Dickensian production lines, and it costs me nothing at all. But when it comes to the washing-up, it’s a different story. Shouting is required. They are disobedient. They run away.
Yes, we used to have a dishwasher. We still do have one, in fact, but it is broken. The day it broke was a day of rejoicing for me, for I had long waged a campaign against it. The problem with the dishwasher, it seems to me, is that it only does half the job. It does not put away. It does not empty itself. It does not clean the really difficult things – the porridge-encrusted pots and fatty frying pans. And worse, unless you expend a lot of effort in keeping up the levels of the various liquids it requires, it will one day deliver your dishes worse than when they went in: hot and with little bits of dirt stuck on like barnacles on a rock.
Then there is the undeniable fact that no one wants to empty it. The dishwasher is at best an expensive postponement of the washing-up and it certainly frees the children from any responsibility.
So this is why I rejoiced when the dishwasher broke down. Now we could return to a traditional means of washing dishes: together. I’ll do the washing, you do the drying, you do the putting away, and so on. My plan was that doing the washing-up ourselves rather than relying on an unreliable machine to do it for us, would achieve two desirable ends: one, it would mean that soon after the meal was finished, the job would be finished: no waiting for hours as the machine laboriously trundles through its cycles.
The other clearly was that we would get the children to help. But they resist, oh, how they resist! They tarry, they dawdle, they suddenly find the puppy hugely interesting. They stand staring when they should be working. They do go-slows, walking at snail’s pace towards the dresser, limply clinging to a single plate. They go deaf. “WILL – YOU – PLEASE – PUT – THIS – AWAY!” And then they will suddenly decide that there is a hierarchy to all this. Putting away is superior to drying up. Or sometimes the other way around. “I want to put away!” they will scream. On occasion, I have lost my temper and thrown them all out of the kitchen so I can quietly complete the job alone. That sometimes seems the easier option.
But no! Do not be tempted to give in. I firmly believe that by painfully accustoming them to helping in the kitchen, they will gradually see helping as a normal part of life. This will also help them to look after themselves as adults, to become capable human beings who don’t need mummies.
The real trick of course would be somehow to enjoy doing the washing-up yourself. And for the children to see it as a high-status job, on a par ideally with stuffing envelopes. As to how to achieve this, I am at a loss. I have tried singing jolly songs while doing it. I have tried to apply the existential philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre, who said that you have chosen to do the washing-up and therefore it makes no sense to moan about it. I have tried to enjoy the sensation of the hot water and the satisfaction of leaving a clean and tidy kitchen. But still the nagging voice in my head says: I hate washing up.
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Washing up was a high status job in out household – if you did the washing you got to pick the music, you got to have it on as load as you liked and you got to flick people with dish cloths. It drove my mother crazy that we always wanted music she couldn’t stand, I think that encouraged us even more actually.
Thank you!! I am loving your website, and especially this post!
Thank you for articulating exactly what it is about dishwashers I hate. Also, you forgot to add that you have to have twice as many dishes and utensils than you would w/o a dishwasher – because so many are always in there, waiting to be washed!
Exactly!! And then there are mean (probably brand-and-age-specific) pitfalls, like if you put a bowl with chocolate cake dough scrapings in, which then mysteriously spread themselves into a hard-baked layer clinging to everything. Argh!
As for the needless waste of materials used to make a dishwasher (what twat invented that?) Ours still works but it is only used as a flat surface to hold up our plate drying rack. Now, i DO hate washing up not because I’m too bone idle to do it. I certainly appreciate the aesthetic of a clean shining piece of beautiful porcelain but I think the washing up comes at the wrong time, just after a splendid feast? I ask you. I prefer the “Withnail” Camden flat approach make the washing up exciting and possibly dangerous because we still use rubber gloves and as a flatmate in Oxford blithely told me “You’ve got to have some bacteria to fight against, don’t you??”
I honestly think it is a deeply rooted British feeling that someone else should do it! Perhaps we visit too many restaurants? and are conditioned.
Hi, I just found your website hunting on Google as I am researching some information on dishwashers. Looks like a good site so I have bookmarked this site and intend to come back tomorrow to enjoy a more detailed read when i have more time. Great site!.
Wait just a minute. You publish an article on a website that rails against the evils of the Industrial Revolution and the hard work and miserable jobs that came with it, but you advocate that parents should force their children to work because it brings back the joys of “Dickensian production lines?” Those production lines were all factory jobs (and therefore Industrial jobs). How on earth do you plan to teach families the joys of not working hard by…forcing children to work like factory workers? Maybe I’ve missed something, but your logic does not seem to make sense. Could you please enlighten me?
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Hello,
i just read your book about Freedom. I think it´s a great book. Now I found this site & I think you are completely right.
As for the dishwasher, I was very happy the day the thing broke. Yes! Finished with the noisy machine. That changed beautiful glasses into ugly ones. That left a lot of work to do for us. That smelled like hell unless you put some expensive dishwasher-perfume in it.
As for the children…I have no idea how to get them to work, that means: doing the dishes.
I hate the screaming and the discussions.
I did find out that it doesn´t work to let them do the dishes together. And also that when I start doing the dishes while I am already cooking, one daughter will help me, and feel glorious & victory because she doesn´t have to do the dishes after dinner. (What´s the difference? I mean, it´s a lot of work too, and there´s lots of pans and dishes too. But it seems that doing the dishes BEFORE dinnertime isn´t as bad as doing the dishes AFTER dinner.)
So, that means there´s a very small job to do when dinner is over. That means that the other girl will help with only little protest because she has less work to do.
Anyway. This works. Sometimes. Other times I do the dishes my self because I LOVE clean dishes. And hot soapy water. And a neat sink.