034: How do I get my child to do chores? - a podcast by Jen Lumanlan

We have a pretty cool mini-mini-series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those “chores your child could be doing” articles showing up in my social media feeds lately, and I was thinking about those as well about how children in other cultures seem to be MUCH more willing to help out with work around the house.  I’m not saying we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in Western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them?

We’re going to hold off on the “getting paid” part for now, and we’ll talk about that very soon with my guest Ron Lieber, the Money columnist of the New York Times who wrote a book called The Opposite of Spoiled. But today we’re going to discuss the chores part with Andrew Coppens, who is an Assistant Professor of Education in Learning Sciences at the University of New Hampshire. If you’ve ever asked your child to do a task in the home only to have them say “No,” then get comfy and listen up, because I have a feeling that our conversation is going to surprise you and give you some new tools for your toolbox.References:

Coppens, A.D.,& Acala, L. (2015). Supporting children’s initiative: Appreciating family contributions or paying children for chores. Advances in Child Development and Behavior 49, 91-112. DOI: http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2015.10.002 (http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/bs.acdb.2015.10.002)

Coppens, A.D., Acala, L., Rogoff, B.,& Mejia-Arauz, R. (2016). Children’s contributions in family work: Two cultural paradigms. In S. Punch, R.M. Vanderbeck,& T. Skelton (Eds.), Families, intergenerationality, and per group relations: Geographies of children and young people (Vol 5). New York, NY: Springer.




LIFE Center (2005).“The LIFE Center’s Lifelong and Lifewide Diagram.”  Retrieved from: http://life-slc.org/about/citationdetails.html 




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Jen:                                      https://www.temi.com/editor/t/a9DZeTltXq-nBHAQy5DWzsShwkDQw8oyIOv4SvM8oLZMkr6rinzEEMd-Fi5zaoDto7ibQh4cnLLwo6C7hqAq0GzA2O0?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=37.37 ([00:37])                   Hello and welcome to the Your Parenting Mojo podcast. Wehave a pretty cool mini mini series launching today. I’ve been seeing a lot of those Chores Your Child Should Be Doing articles showing up in my social media feeds lately and I was thinking about those as well as some of the ethnographic research that we’ve discussed on previous episodes of the podcast where I’ve read about six year olds cooking for a group of adults who were on a trip for a week and willingly helping to care for younger siblings and cleaning up around the house without being asked and as I often do when these kinds of things come up, I started to wonder why don’t our children cook meals at age six and willingly help to care for younger siblings and clean up around the house without being asked? I’m not saying that we want to train our children to be slave laborers, but why is it that children in western cultures really don’t seem to do chores unless they’re paid to do them?

Jen:                                      https://www.temi.com/editor/t/a9DZeTltXq-nBHAQy5DWzsShwkDQw8oyIOv4SvM8oLZMkr6rinzEEMd-Fi5zaoDto7ibQh4cnLLwo6C7hqAq0GzA2O0?loadFrom=DocumentDeeplink&ts=89.57 ([01:29])                   So we’re going to hold off on the getting paid part for now and we’ll talk about that very soon with my guest, Ron Lieber, who’s the money columnist of the New York Times and wrote a book called The Opposite of Spoiled. But today we’re going to discuss the chores part with Andrew Coppens, who is an Assistant Professor of Education and learning sciences at the University of New Hampshire. Dr Coppens’ work examines how children from a number of cultural communities learn to help collaborate and how they get motivated to learn...

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