Only 1 Out of Every 4 of You Make Your Kids Do Chores? Seriously?

Could the article in this past weekend’s Boston Globe possibly have been correct when it reported on the results of a study published in Psychology Today which “found that fewer than 25 percent of American parents compel their kids to perform chores?”

As if that wasn’t dismal enough, the article elaborated:

“In several cases, children staunchly refused to do chores when asked or ordered by their parents. And one father who was observed for the study so frequently withdrew his requests for chores and performed them himself after his children refused that researchers described him to be functioning as his child’s ‘valet.’”

Which led me to this question: Who’s in charge, the parents or the kids?

Don’t get me wrong, getting the Picket Fence Post kids to do their chores (walking the dog, feeding the dog, cleaning up the yard from the dog, vacuuming, dusting, cleaning bathrooms, etc.) isn’t easy. At all. In fact I often feel as though I need a nice cool adult beverage after I’m unwillingly thrust into the role of the nagging mom in order to get them to do their assigned work. Even my attempts to short-circuit the griping and my having to nag by clearly assigning said chores next to a kid’s name on the family calendar don’t really work. I still receive guff even when they recognize that it’s their turn to walk the dog. But they know if they don’t do their chores, they won’t get paid. (Yes, The Spouse and I pay them.)

Sometimes it seems as though it’d be a whole lot easier, and that there’d be much less shouting and bickering in my house if I didn’t insist that the kids help us out and work as a team by doing chores. I wouldn’t have to nag them as much and things would be done the way I want them done. (For example, The Youngest Boy doesn't always "clean" the bathroom the way The Spouse and I think it should be done, but he's only 10, so we cut him ample slack.) If we didn't have them pitch in however, I’d be condemning myself and The Spouse to forever doing everything around the house while the children act like spoiled, pampered little princes and a princess while their environs are taken care of by their indentured servants. (I already cart them around places and organize my life around their activities, so I already feel like their valets.) By not enforcing the do-your-chores mantra, The Spouse and I would be sending kids out into the world not fully comprehending the notions of responsibility, self-reliance and teamwork.

I’m completely on board with the Los Angeles psychologist/author who told the Globe that: “Parents are doing themselves, their children and society a disservice when they don’t assign chores and make sure they’re done. Yes, it does take time to supervise kids in the beginning, but later on, they’ll make your life easier and save you money, as well as know how to take care of a home and family when they’re adults.”

If you go by the stats, the Picket Fence Post family is in the minority here. What about your family? Do you make the kids do chores, if so, do you pay them? If you don’t , why not?

Kids Behaving Badly in Public Makes It Difficult for Everybody Else

When the Picket Fence Post family was on vacation on Cape Cod last week, we visited Marion’s Pie Shop in Chatham, Mass. and let each kid pick out their own, small pie. (For the record, they picked chocolate cream, cherry and Dutch apple pies. Due to my dairy allergy, I, unfortunately, went pie-less.)

It was the sign posted on the outside of the shop that caught my attention: “Well Behaved Children Welcome. The Rest Will Be Made Into Pies.”

Thus I was inspired to write this latest column for Modern Mom about how I thought there was an unspoken social compact that if your kids act like heathens in public, you, the parent, are supposed to take the screaming urchins from the premises until they calm the heck down (as I’ve unfortunately had to do on many an occasion).

But apparently there isn’t such a compact after all as there are a ton of parents with kids who act like nuts in public and the adults no longer feel required to reign in their young kids. They just let 'em run around restaurants, dump merchandise all over the place and take them to rated R movies at 10 o'clock at night. This behavior is prompting people who are sick of all of this to ban kids in public venues, making things difficult for the rest of us who try our best to teach our kids how to behave and when they don't, remove them from the restaurant/store/theater, etc.

When did things change?

Brief Blogging Break ‘Til Aug. 8

I’ll be enjoying a blogging hiatus until next Monday, trying to spend some quality time with the Picket Fence Post family (provided the boys don’t send me to the hospital with one of their pranks).

Not to worry, though. I’ll be covertly taking notes on all our adventures. (And when all this family togetherness gets to be too much family togetherness, I'll retreat to a "Mommy timeout" with a book in my hand.)

In the meantime, enjoy my latest piece over on Modern Mom about how I'm okay with the fact that I often say, "No" to my kids when they want to do things like watch The Hangover or play Call of Duty, making me supremely uncool and unhip. But it's okay. I can take it.

Attempting to Exploit Potter Mania for Household Peace

Up until last week, we were a Three Strikes household . . . as in each kid could accrue up to three strikes a day for behaving badly. Upon receiving a third strike, a privilege would be revoked for the remainder of the day, say, watching TV, playing video games or going to a friend’s house. If the kid continued to misbehave, privileges would be revoked for the following day. (Frequently, though, I was a soft touch and allowed the kids to “earn away” the strike by being super good.)
However the Three Strikes technique had mixed results here in the Picket Fence Post household. Thus I decided to try a different tact this summer.


Image credit: Warner Brothers via Yahoo Kids

Capitalizing on the excitement regarding the release of the final Harry Potter film – and the fact that The Spouse and I are still doing our Harry Potter Reading Aloud Project with The Youngest Son – I went a different way. Instead of using the punitive Three Strikes system, I’ve decided to implement my own version of Hogwarts’ “House points” system. It works like this:

If a kid exhibits “good behavior” – a completely subjective determination made by either The Spouse or me – he or she gets a penny (or “House point”) deposited into his or her jar on the kitchen counter. Just like at Hogwarts, if someone behaves badly, he or she can lose one or more “House points.” At the end of the week, the child with the most House points gets to select a film for Family Movie Night. At the end of the month, the kid with the most points will be able to select a family activity (which needs parental approval) for a Saturday or a Sunday.

The first week yielded an absolute blizzard of good behavior. The kids were doing the dishes, taking out the trash, offering shoulder rubs, fetching my newspapers from the driveway, making me cups of tea. It was a pleasure to have such doting people around, even though I knew they were only in it for House points. But by the end of the week, The Girl realized that her twin brother had been outgunning her and protested, saying that kids shouldn’t be rewarded for “sucking up.” And she had a point.

Now, in its second week, there’s not so much a blizzard as there are intermittent flurries of good behavior, especially since we said that they shouldn’t overtly try to suck up to us. Plus, there’s been an uptick in the deduction of House points for bad behavior.

Maybe I should channel a bit more of the tough-minded albeit fair Professor McGonagall for the remainder of the summer.

Image credit: Warner Brothers via Yahoo Kids.

Three for Thursday: The Pop Culture Edition: 'The Middle,' 'Modern Family' & 'Parenthood'

Image credit: ABC

The Middle: Don’t Cave on the Punishment

The latest episode of The Middle sparked all kinds of debate in the Picket Fence Post house about how far The Spouse and I would go to make a point and stand our ground when we punish a kid in the hopes of teaching him or her a lesson.

In The Middle’s fictional Heck family, the obnoxious, clueless teenage son Axl would not stop leaving his dirty socks all over the house. This habit was driving his father Mike absolutely insane. After repeatedly asking Axl to refrain from abandoning his socks, Axl continued with his slovenly ways until Mike threw down the gauntlet: If Mike found one more dirty sock lying around the house, he’d punish him, big time, take away something Axl cares about.

That next time occurred shortly thereafter. Mike was highly frustrated and, when Axl got all snarky and challenged Mike to take away whatever he wanted, Mike told him he couldn’t play in his final basketball game of the season . . . a move Mike immediately regretted and which his wife Frankie, behind closed doors, said she thought was idiotic. (She said she would’ve taken away use of the car, his iPod, his cell phone or TV before going to the extreme of taking away a kid’s season ending hoop game.)

And when Mike and Frankie learned that Axl was on the cusp of breaking his father’s high school record for the most free throws in a single season, they started actively looking for ways to try to back off the punishment without looking like they were backing off. They, in essence, caved.

The Spouse and I agreed that had one of us hastily punished a kid without realizing that he or she was on the verge of breaking a record, we’d likely offer the kid a choice: Miss the game OR lose the car/iPod/cell phone. However if it wasn’t the last game, too freakin’ bad. Next time, pick up your damned socks kid.



Modern Family’s 'We Love the Word'

Modern Family was so fun this week. I really needed the laughter it gave me like a little gift I didn't know I needed.

From Phil Dunphy’s ill-advised minivan shrink-wrap scheme to promote his real estate business – which would up making the family minivan look like a giant ad for an escort service with Claire and Haley serving as Phil’s escorts – to Cameron’s over-the-top middle school musical direction, I was thoroughly entertained.

As the end of the season draws near, I’m already starting to feel Modern Family withdrawal symptoms.

Image credit: NBC

Parenthood: Dealing with Teens is a Massive Emotional Challenge

Boy was NBC’s Parenthood a tough watch this week, leading up to the season finale next Tuesday.

There was the distinctly uncomfortable scenario of parents learning that their 16-year-old was having sex with her boyfriend. Sure, the mom, Kristina Braverman, had come right out and asked her daughter Haddie if she and her boyfriend were having sex, so when the girl eventually told her they were, Kristina should’ve had some kind of plan about what she’d do with that information. Instead, Kristina, who first had sex at age 15, looked baffled and uncertain as to what she was supposed to do next. Her husband Adam was horrified, wouldn’t even look at Haddie and had a great deal of trouble dealing with the contrast of him seeing her as a little girl and seeing Haddie as a young woman who was discovering her sexuality. (I covered this in more detail in my episode review.) The subject of teenage sex was dealt with in such a realistic fashion that The Spouse was definitely squirming in his seat.

Then there was the sadness surrounding the whip-smart and edgy Amber, the high school senior who plunged into a downward spiral when she learned that she didn’t get into either of the colleges to which she applied. She started doing drugs, drinking and engaging in reckless behavior, including showing up at a restaurant to meet her mother for dinner while high and dressed bizarrely.

It just breaks your heart as a parent to watch a child endure emotional pain and watch her mother Sarah struggle with how to help her child guide through this wrenchingly difficult time.

The entire episode made me admire parents of teens – which I’ll become at the end of the summer – all the more for the challenges with which they must deal and still attempt to retain their sanity.

Image credits: Eric McCandless/ABC and NBC.

The Fall-Out from ‘Tiger Mother’ Continues as Folks Seek the ‘Right’ Way to Parent

The new controversial book about “Chinese mothering” that I mentioned last week – Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother by Amy Chua – which was excerpted in the Wall Street Journal under the title, “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” continues to generate controversy. And responses. Loads of responses. Some of them are angry. (Chua has received death threats.) Some of them are defensive. Several are funny.

Here are a few of the responses:

Judith Warner, author of Perfect Madness: Motherhood in the Age of Anxiety, wrote a piece in the New York Times Magazine entitled “No More Mrs. Nice Mom” in which she placed Chua’s piece into context, as yet another reaction by parents who are sick of being told how to parent but are constantly searching for a new way to exert control and influence over their children:

“Despite the obvious limits of Chua’s appeal, her publisher is clearly banking on her message finding wide resonance among American moms worn out from trying to do everything right for kids who mimic Disney Channel-style disrespect for parents, spend hours a day on Facebook, pick at their lovingly prepared food and generally won’t get with the program. The gimmick of selling a program of Chinese parenting is a great one for a time when all the talk is of Chinese ascendancy and American decline. . . And there is true universality behind the message [Chua is] honest enough to own: that she is terrified of ‘family decline,’ that she fears that raising a ‘soft, entitled child’ will let ‘my family fail.’ Her deepest hope is that by insisting upon perfection from her children in all things, like violin playing, she will be able to achieve, in her words, control: ‘Over generational decline. Over birth order. Over one’s destiny. Over one’s children.’”

Three for Thursday: Controversy Over 'Chinese Mothering,' Teens on TV & 'The Middle's' Little Brick

Image credit: Wall Street Journal

Item #1: Controversy Over ‘Chinese Mothering’

Amy Chua wrote a book, Battle Hymn of the Tiger Mother. It’s about how she started off her life as a mother of two girls as a very strict, “traditional Chinese” mother, like her parents before her. By the end of the book – in which Chua says she gets her “comeuppance” – Chua says she realized she wanted to “retreat . . . from the strict immigrant model” of raising her daughters, according to an interview she gave to the Wall Street Journal.

However the Wall Street Journal ran an excerpt of the first part of Chua’s book, when Chua was describing being fully bought into the strict, no messin’ around style of parenting that believes that children are strong and need to be pushed, not coddled or allowed to choose the direction of their lives. Outside of the context of the whole book -- and without knowing that Chua says she’s “not exactly the same person at the end of the book” -- Chua seems extremely domineering. Combine that excerpt with the headline (which Chua didn’t chose) “Why Chinese Mothers are Superior,” and you'll see why folks went nuts on the internet, calling Chua every variation on "Mommy Dearest" which they could come up with. Here are some excerpts which’ll give you a sense of why people were outraged by what ran in the Journal:

“Here are some things my daughters, Sophia and Louisa, were never allowed to do:

• attend a sleepover
• have a playdate
• be in a school play
• complain about not being in a school play
• watch TV or play computer games
• choose their own extracurricular activities
• get any grade less than an A
• not be the No. 1 student in every subject except gym and drama
• play any instrument other than the piano or violin
• not play the piano or violin.”

Then there was the anecdote about Chua's then-7-year-old who was having trouble with a piano piece and, after the girl and her mom worked on it “nonstop for a week” and the daughter wanted to give up, Chua ordered her back to the piano:

“Back at the piano, Lulu made me pay. She punched, thrashed and kicked. She grabbed the music score and tore it to shreds. I taped the score back together and encased it in a plastic shield so that it could never be destroyed again. Then I hauled Lulu’s dollhouse to the car and told her I’d donate it to the Salvation Army piece by piece if she didn’t have ‘The Little White Donkey’ perfect by the next day. When Lulu said, ‘I thought you were going to the Salvation Army, why are you still here?’ I threatened her with no lunch, no dinner, no Christmas or Hanukkah presents, no birthday parties for two, three, four years. When she kept playing it wrong, I told her she was purposely working herself into a frenzy because she was secretly afraid she couldn’t do it. I told her to stop being lazy, cowardly, self-indulgent and pathetic.”

Being 'The One' Who's Mean and, Apparently, Power-Mad

Image credit: Comics Kingdom/Oregonian

“Why do you have to be the one?”

That’s what a child of mine – who shall remain nameless -- asked me recently when said individual was railing against me, the power-mad, all controlling mother who'd said, "No," to something the person requested. Over the past few weeks, here are the questions two of the Picket Fence Post kids have asked me this person wanted to know was:

Why do I have to work? (Two of my children gripe about the fact hat I’m not as available as “the other moms” who volunteer in the schools, constantly arrange play dates for their kids and sign their offspring up for as many sports and activities as the children desire. Meanwhile, I can barely get the kids to their sports practices on time, feed them, oversee their homework and do my own work.)

Why do I make the family go to church? (Our Christian-Jewish family attends a Unitarian Universalist church where the Picket Fence Post kids – two of ‘em anyway – are practically dragged kicking and screaming into Sunday school each week. They think that my forcing them to go to church is, like, totally unfair and mean.)

Why don’t I drive the kids to school/pick them up every day like other parents? (Whenever possible, I have the kids take the school bus. It's simply more convenient. However because they have to be at school early – meaning before the bus would arrive at the school – for various activities, The Spouse or I already drive them to school three mornings a week.)

Why do I buy “only healthy” foods and try to avoid foods containing high fructose corn syrup and hydrogenated fats when “no one else's mother” does? (I’m constantly accused of depriving my children of sweets and being a wild-eyed health nut. Me! The one who’s addicted to coffee and has an unhealthy attachment to barbecue potato chips. When I pointed out to the child who was asking me this question that, during the course of the week in which this statement was uttered, I’d made apple crisp served it with ice cream, bought a second gallon of ice cream, purchased Mint Milanos, snickerdoodle cookies and Cheez-Its, the kid replied, “Well those don’t count.” Why didn’t those foods count? Because all the sweets/snacks had already been consumed when the kid said this, except for the vanilla ice cream, and the complainer didn’t feel like having vanilla ice cream.)

Why don’t I allow the children to have unfettered access to the internet and computers in their rooms like “all the other kids at school?” (The kids can use a family laptop computer as long as they do so in a common area of the house – like the kitchen or dining room – and there’s a parental control on it which, I must say, is a pain in the neck as I'm constantly having to "approve" sites. In instances when they’ve wanted to go on YouTube -- which gets blocked, they’ve had to do it with me or The Spouse overseeing it. This makes me/us overprotective, hovering freak(s), apparently.)

Why do I limit their TV watching/video game playing? (We have a so-called “TV hour” on weekdays, timed to occur when I’m making dinner and don’t feel like dealing with the inevitable gripes about what I’m cooking. However they’ll keep watching/playing long after the hour has elapsed, waiting for me to tell them to turn it off. Even if it’s been in excess of an hour, I still get griping or pleas of, “Oh Mom, just let me finish this level” or “But we just started this show!”)

Why won’t I let them have cell phones when “tons of other kids” in their school have them? (I’ve told them that when they’re going to be in locations where they will have to spend time alone, without adult supervision, or if they have to walk long distances alone, I’ll get – or loan them – cell phones. So far, there hasn’t been a need for them. When they’ve taken walks with the dog, I've let them borrow my phone. This unreasonable, irrational anti-cell phone stance means that I’ve destroyed their street cred and made it impossible for the other kids to text them.) This last question was the subject of today’s Pajama Diaries comic which made me laugh when I saw it this morning.

Sometimes being “The One” who places all these restrictions on the kids feels pretty lonely, especially when they make me sound like just this side of Attila the Hun. I just hope that, once they're older, they'll get that I was trying to do what I thought was right for them, not act like a power-mad dictator. Believe me, it's not because it's fun being "The One." It'd be much easier for me to say, "Yes" to most of these things instead of enduring their criticisms all the time as they sometimes wish aloud that one of the "other" sainted mothers that their friends have were their mom.

Image credit: Pajama Diaries via Oregonian/Comics Kingdom.