The problem is that most parents don't want to (or can't) invest the time and effort into teaching their kids how to do household tasks.
When your children are young it's easier to just to tasks yourself than to try and get your children to do it, they'll break things and make mistakes in the course of learning.
But that's how you learn. I had to cook dinner once a week from the age of around 12. Sure my parents had a few shit dinners when I started out and sometimes I made a massive mess (or set things on fire!), but I learned how to cook and bake. Same goes for any other household tasks.
You can start way before 12 with cooking. My son made scrambled eggs a day before his third birthday. (I just put the stuff out and told him what to do -- he put the butter in the pan, turned the stove on, cracked and scrambled the egg, and poured it into the pan. The only thing he struggled with was getting the egg out of the pan fast enough that it wouldn't burn, so I helped with that.)
In the kitchen he can peel garlic, fill ice trays, make bread dough into rolls ... and again, he's just turned three. He's much slower with all of those things than I am, but if I time things right, he's actually a (small) net positive. For example, he'll make one roll, and I'll make the other 7, or I'll give him 4 cloves of garlic 10 minutes before I need them.
I'd be very careful with kids under 4 because they don't have all their reflexes yet. I know it sounds weird, but that reflex where your arm pulls itself back from something hot doesn't exist at that age. Little kids make up a huge proportion of burn victims for that reason. 5+ should be OK though.
The very early cooking memory for me is making mince pies. I'd cut out the shaped tops (a variety of christmas trees, stars, bells etc) whilst mum did the bases and filled them and I'd put the covers on and glaze them. Slightly later I'd get to roll the pastry as well.
Much like making our own pizzas (putting the toppings on) - you had entertained children whilst also being productive. I wouldn't have described this as "chores" though. (they came later)
> The problem is that most parents don't want to (or can't) invest the time and effort into teaching their kids how to do household tasks.
The problem with that is that teaching kids how to do human tasks is basically the definition of parenting. You're correct that many parents don't parent — but that's a problem which needs to be solved.
Phones and technology also get in our way and we as a society have become passive in parenting. The pay back when they are pre-teens is going to be painful. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/02/smartphone.aspx
> The pay back when they are pre-teens is going to be painful.
And when they’re teens, and young adults, and older adults too. I think that misparenting & malparenting (and miseducation & maleducation) are to blame for a lot of our modern problems, e.g. school shootings (something which, so far as I can tell, essentially didn’t exist until the 90s, despite weapons being a huge part of American culture for over 200 years).
I don’t believe we should ignore technology, and indeed it offers a lot for parenting (e.g. phones could enable parents to allow their children more freedom, rather than being used to grant them less). But as a society we’ve not figured out how to use it wisely yet.
I also think that we’ve deliberately ignored the lessons of the past and of other cultures, but that quickly becomes an entirely different discussion …
> And when they’re teens, and young adults, and older adults too. I think that misparenting & malparenting (and miseducation & maleducation) are to blame for a lot of our modern problems, e.g. school shootings (something which, so far as I can tell, essentially didn’t exist until the 90s, despite weapons being a huge part of American culture for over 200 years).
I'm not a parent, but if life has taught me anything is that time invested now is time saved in the future. Also, it's not only children who mess up a learning process. Anyone who's learning will make mistakes and probably break things. I'll never forget when my brother, being in his late teens, broke the food processor trying to prepare macaroni.
> When your children are young it's easier to just to tasks yourself than to try and get your children to do it, they'll break things and make mistakes in the course of learning.
Is it? N=1, but almost since my toddler could walk we always cleaned up after breakfast together. She vacuums any food crumbs off the floor and table while I do the dishes. Sometimes she also helps out drying the dishes. I am happy that I and her mother taught her that because it is really also easier for me. She really feels useful when participating, and takes constructive criticism of necessary.
This opposed to the kids of a colleague of mine which won't lift a finger and rather couch potato with a iPad or iPhone.
It's totally possible to learn to cook without ever ruining a meal. You start by working under supervision and doing prep tasks - a lot like the hierarchy in a professional kitchen.
My daughter is three and she already cracks the eggs for breakfast. We’ve ended up with a few yolks on the countertop but it works pretty well. Today I took out the garbage and came back to discover she’d put a new bag in, without any prompting whatsoever. She desperately -wants- to be useful and get our approval, and it’s really endearing. It makes me really proud of my little child, even if the day before she pulled all the stuffing out of the pillow.
It believe it also helps that we don’t have TV or any electronic devices for her to use. We dabbled in Daniel Tiger and the like, and her behavior immediately became worse, and the TV was the only way to mollify her.
My parents were never adventurous cooks (ironic, considering they love travelling to other countries for their cuisine), but I've always loved pushing culinary boundaries. A standard dinner cooked by my mum might consist of rice, microwaved vegetables, and microwaved chicken breast with a jar or packet of sauce mix. Most meals my parents cooked were based around pre-made sauces or seasoning packets.
I think the ruined meals were more a case of me biting off more than I could chew and attempting something beyond my skill level. I've always loved experimenting in the kitchen, but when I was starting out it didn't always go so well.
My experimenting has paid dividends though, as people are constantly impressed at everything I cook.
We started using Blue Apron a couple of times a week and an unexpected benefit was that my kids have started cooking and helping in meal prep more. Having the correct ingredients in the needed portion size with clear text and lots of images makes cooking very kid friendly.
This isn’t Mayan “supermom” magic. Kids all over the world (including the US) do manual labor around the house/farm. Kids who don’t earn their keep are a relatively new invention.
(I’m probably the first child in my family line to not work growing up. Most Americans probably are not more than a generation or two removed from that.)
Except this concept appears to be about making chores fun for kids before they can even do those chores properly.
Which is clearly different than kids “earning their keep” which presumes they’re at an age that they can actually successfully and competently do those tasks.
I have friends, who are adults, who have never cooked. If I put them in my kitchen tomorrow and expected them to feed themselves, they'd be eating burned cereal and cold beans.
Kids always have inherently less context in a situation. They'll get the context when you give it to them, but they just take a bit more time to ramp up. That doesn't mean you shouldn't teach them - since if you don't teach them now they won't magically know in a decade or two.
But is it really critical to make chores feel fun for the kids?
By definition, chores are routine tasks, and it's natural for kids and adults to feel them as "not fun". I believe it's important to make kids realize that for the household to run successfully, we have to do them despite them being "not fun".
Having to do work that is not fun is an important life skill. Children should have lots of play time, but "work" needs to be understood. You do it even if you don't like it because nobody else will do it for you.
"Play" is the psychological/biological term for how children (of all species) learn important life skills by naturally finding them fun. Now that important life skills aren't obvious/instinctive because society is so complex, making those complex skills fun is the way to integrate them into the child's natural humanity. We don't need to make children miserable just for misery's sake out of some Puritanical ethic.
Nobody is saying to overload a child until they are unhappy. But the lesson needs to be learned that even if they don't naturally find it fun it still has to be done.
> Except this concept appears to be about making chores fun for kids
Not really, you extrapolated that. It's about getting them to do chores early. But real ones, and giving them some leeway even if they are not 'really' providing value yet.
I agree that children have historically put in a lot of work. The premise of the article is that the “Maya method” makes them more likely to volunteer to do so.
At least that’s what led the author to try to engage the toddler in chores.
Seems like a classic "meaningless anecdote" type article. I understand why they are written this way, but it irritates me: "Let's address a common issue which mysteriously, science has not managed to solve by applying some science!" immediately followed up by "Here's a completely unscientific observation that I will imply you should interpret as some sort of evidence".
I can't help but think that such writing does more harm than good in that it probably convinces a lot of lay people that this is how scientists operate, resulting in them having little to no faith that science itself is a rigorous discipline.
I generally agree with your sentiment. But To be fair, the linked article about the scientific part of the supermom actually takes a very critical look at the scientific studies.
Also applying the principle of charity [1], you could think of it this way:
the author looked at some studies, did a field trip. Now she tries an experiment at home and reports on it. She does not claim to present any rigorous scientific findings.
I’ve actually stayed with a Mayan family in Guatemala for a month or so while I was taking Spanish classes and the ‘maya secret’ is mostly that they’re really poor, there’s no concept of upward mobility and their entire extended family lives near by and they’re going to do what their parents and their parents parents and their parents parents did for a living.
I’m not downing them— they’ve been the victims of a huge amount of discrimination and their country’s economy is a basket case, so they do as well as they can giving their circumstances.
But I guarantee that if the Mayan family moved to the us or even Guatemala City, that life style would disappear in a generation.
There’s actually a lot to be said for that way of life. There’s a real sense of community that I don’t think I’ve ever felt anywhere in the us. I thought about moving there, but as with everything there’s good and bad aspects of it.
It all defines and will reflect on how parents teach them. It's not a child labor or something if you teach a child to do some chores. Teach them while you can as they will carry it thru them in their whole life as they also will become a parent when time comes. It is their privilege not yours(parent). Childredn in Japan are thought to do chores it's not some technique or something, It's to teach them how to be responsible https://www.indiatoday.in/education-today/featurephilia/stor...
Based on what I've been told by relatives who grew up in Japan, students are also required to help clean the classrooms and other school facilities from grade school through high school. This is probably wishful thinking, but if we had this in the U.S., we may have fewer adults who think they can act like pigs in shared spaces.
I remember a kid in middle school who dropped his lunch tray, spilling food all over a table and the floor. He got up and went back to the line to get more food. I asked him why he didn't try to clean it up or at least tell someone. He told me "That is what the janitors are for". For some reason this really stuck with me, and I think about it whenever I see someone purposely littering.
"And toddlers are great at rinsing dishes before putting them into the dishwasher."
Don't teach them kids to waste water rinsing dishes! The dishwasher works most efficiently if chunks of food are removed (scrape into trash), but not rinsed.
Yep, this is a habit that seems to die hard for people. A modern dishwasher, even a $400 one, does not require you to rinse your dishes. It’s like magic, that turgidity sensor.
That was confusing, but today I learned dishwashers have turbidity sensors[1], and that turgidity[2] is the force that pushes the cell's plasma against the wall. Took a while to sort that out, but thanks! :)
Yes, in my case, it does. Perhaps it's just that the dish washer is old or slightly malfunctioning, but nothing gives me baked on crap on dishes faster than not rinsing the "sauces" off the dishes.
My wife was in agreement with you, until I let her run a few loads without cleaning them off - it was disgusting. So, yeah. 5-10 seconds per dish to rinse them off is often time and water well spent for a hygienic kitchen.
Specifically, it's proteins that set and harden with heat. Oils come off trivially in the dishwasher (unless they became polymerized through heat, a common process on pots and pans).
The other variable is the time the dishes sit dirty before the dishwasher gets turned on.
I'm not against your view, but is the water actually 'wasted'? I think the water you used for rinsing the dishes is recycled in the water cleaning facility. I might be wrong of course, but this water has to go somewhere.
It depends on where you are, I'd say. If you live in a water-rich area, water itself should be fine to use. The question is how much energy goes into heating and cleaning it afterwards though. If you live in a water-poor area, it's a different story.
edit: And the cycle is impacted as well, depending on the water flow. Here, water comes out from the aquifier, and is then entered into a river, so it is a shortcut (no spring, no small trickles that join together, and no staying within the aquifier, so the level might be lowered). If this is a problem or not depends on the specific situation.
> I think the water you used for rinsing the dishes is recycled in the water cleaning facility.
Which is a process that requires resources that otherwise wouldn't have been needed. A better question would probably be "Is the amount of waste non-negligible?" which I don't have an answer to, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's a lot more than you expect.
I suspect it's a holdover practice from the early days of dishwashers, where they weren't so reliably good at cleaning. Now it's generally irrelevant, but like all rituals that once made sense it's now taught as gospel.
Even when the dishwasher is good at cleaning, too much stuck-on food starts to gunk up the drain and jets of the dishwasher. It gets the dishes clean, but there are definitely still long-term maintenance headaches that you avoid. IMO, that maintenance is easier than rinsing every day, but it's concentrated pain rather than diffused.
Needing a couple liters of drinking water daily to stay alive is actually quite universal.
Water is abundant is the ocean, but it is not drinking water. Drinking water is a scarce resources and using it to rinse dishes that are going into a dishwasher is an unnecessary waste of a vital resource.
You know the saying “X doesn’t grow on trees”? Water literally falls from the sky. Sure, there are some parts of the world where it is in short supply, but where it is abundant, there is virtually no impact of overuse in a family setting.
Comparing it to food doesn’t make sense because food has to be planted, watered, fertilized, harvested, and transported. Water that falls into a local reservoir takes a negligible amount of energy by comparison.
Drinking water does not fall from the sky, in part of the world where there are factories, motor vehicles, power plants, lightning and other cause of air pollution rain water is usually contaminated.
It may be considered safe to use to water your lawn unless it is too acid, but you should not drinking without treating it first. Especially if it has been collected and stored in a reservoir.
Then again food literally grows on trees, you just have to collect it.
Point is most of the time dishwashers do not run on rain water but on drinking water which is a scarce and vital resource so we ought to avoid wasting it.
Purifying and moving that water around uses energy. Maybe it's negligible maybe it's not, depending on where you live. Regardless, the seeming abundance of a natural resource doesn't mean that you should willfully waste it. I come from a country that struggles frequently with droughts so maybe I'm biased.
And the point being made is that other resources are being optimized for instead - wrinse cleaning uses less effort and thus time. The resource of concern varies by area as well.
Technically a nonpotatable unpurified water tap could be used for the same purpose but in addition to the risk of "oops accidentally drank direct river water with pollution and/or hazardous natrual bacteria" the infrastructure for the fringe use would be less efficient than just purifying more water to be flushed down the drain as a cleaning process.
Plus in say southern California the freshwater purification is not the limit but the input water hence the dirty looks for bottling it there instead of say the Great Lakes area where it is actually abundant. Hong Kong I believe is one of the few places that uses salt water to flush their toliets despite large seaside cities being in no way rare.
It is like mass production technically wasting more materials - at that point it usually doesn't matter compared to the sheer efficiency gains.
Granted non-sustainable uses of source water is something to be accounted for.
would be nice if true but turning waste water into drinking water is actually among the most difficult things and requires a very significant amount of high tech to achieve.
drinking water is a scarce resource and around 98% of use is not drinking but turning it into waste water and sewage.
Whether drinking water is a scarce resource or not depends on where you life. In many parts of the world saving water makes zero sense, because the sewers need a certain amount of water to prevent clogging. If people save too much the water company has to flush the pipes.
Do you have an actual source (i.e. a document/web page)? I always thought it's just a matter of distilling it, filtering it, and/or doing some reverse osmosis (which is indeed technologically non-trivial, but it's quite established tech).
"Just" a matter of distilling it? Have you ever looked at the sheer amount of water entering and leaving a water cleaning plant? It's not a matter of having the technology, but of doing it at scale.
This reminds me of Montessori "casa" classrooms. At ages 3-6, kids learn a variety of tasks that are akin to household chores, things like sweeping, polishing silverware or serving tea. It's not quite like the article - kids participating in the normal operation of the household - but slightly more ceremonial, doing the task beautifully, for it's own sake.
This would require convincing my other family members to give up their smartphones (such as my wife) and that ain't going to happen. You see, unless the family you've made is a strict dictatorship, there's more than one vote. And I don't want to live in or create a dictatorship.
My wife and I both agree to do smartphone detox every once in awhile. We set the parental control passwords on each other’s phones, and block safari and web browsing, and new app installs. Also YouTube and social media apps.
We can still listen to audiobooks and it’s voluntary both ways. My wife decides what she wants me to block and if the other asks we re enable it.
The first few days really really suck. It’s super boring and I feel like an addict with how many times I unlock my phone then realize there’s nothing to do on it.
At the same time, after you’ve reset your “baseline” stimulation level, it’s amazing how many things get done. Also, my daughter LOVES how much attention she gets.
It’s not a dictatorship, but that doesn’t mean you and your wife can’t be of one accord sometimes. If it’s sometbing you’re truly interest in, and not just writing off because you think it’s a dumb idea, have a conversation with your wife. You might be surprised.
I don’t understand how people have a problem getting their children to do their chores.
Just having a good attitude (I’m referring to the parent) and investing the time is all it takes. Frankly, getting responsible adults to do chores requires no less of an investment.
It's quite simple really, not all children are the same.
I would be the first to agree that investing the time and having a good attitude would probably be quite enough for many families. But I feel that it would be quite unfair to many families to suggest that it always works, because it doesn't.
Why it doesn't always work like this might be easiest shown by considering cases of rather minor cognitive disabilities, some of which can still make doing chores a lifelong struggle.
In this context it's clear to a anyone having relevant experience with such a disability - even disabilities at subclinical levels - that any blanket statement about what works is always false. The variety is simply too great.
Extrapolating from that we can conclude that: As there are few, or no, binary parameters when it comes to humans, the above example is enough to show that the reason why not all parents get their children to do chores is that we are currently bounded at the top - at least - by our lack of understanding of the immense cognitive variation in humans, and our ability for effective interventions.
The story is more complex than that, and it is likely much could be done to improve outcomes for both parents and children.
Force them? It always worked for me and my brothers!
Household chores, Pfft. In 2/3rds of the world kids as small as 10 even help with actual work in the fields, house, and so on, and the family wouldn't manage otherwise.
I remember reading the first article about the Mayan moms and now this made me think that this method is very logical and we just forgot in our rushed modern lifestyle.
When you think about it, a child not doing chores is raised to believe they're somehow outside of the family unit. Most families start with one child and two parents. So you're subconsciously telling that one child that you are its servants and all it will ever do in life is play.
I'm having my first kid soon and have pretty high ambitions for teaching him to program. Maybe I'll try the pair programming/Mayan chore method to get him up to speed.
I don't know where the balance is and I'm not a parent but... I feel like I wish my parents had forced me to learn a musical instrument. My whole fathers side of the family plays/played. Some famiously so. My parents took the "if he shows interest attitude"
I know of almost zero kids that enjoy practicing their instrument as a kid yet I believe the majority of adults are happy for the experience. (I have no data tho). I certainly just wanted to do other things (play with friends) so I showed no or not enough interest for my parents to push/encourge learning an instrument.
Assuming I'm correct following the advice of "see what they're interested in" would seem to lead to worse outcomes at some level.
of course I'm not suggesting shoving things down their throats so to speak rather it seems like there's room for some balance between only encourage their interest and require them to do x?
Just do it now - an adult can ramp up quickly with focused practice too. Though you’ll still have nobody forcing you to do it. You can probably reach a pretty good ability level in a year or two of taking lessons and practice.
Band instruments will be harder, but piano, guitar, or ukulele are all doable.
More importantly, the piano is the instrument of choice for understanding and participating in music theory, which means that with some fundamental understanding and a lot of practice it unlocks many other instruments, as well.
You're definitely right there's a spectrum and a balance each family has to decide for themselves, but I just wanted to share my anecdotal evidence that there are kids that are passionate about practicing.
My son is learning an instrument from a very young age and almost all of the drive comes from himself. Of course he doesn't always want to practice right now, so we have to push to encourage consistency, but he's so passionate he wants to keep at it even when it's hard work and stressful for all of us.
I'm sure one day, "I don't want to practice today" will evolve into "I want to quit" and I'm dreading having to determine if that's really a life choice or just temporary (week? month? year?) hurdle we should push through.
That's one of my internal struggles as I prepare to be a parent. My parents forced me to do soccer and piano, even though I was terrible for years and years. Now i'm a pretty decent soccer player, and very skilled pianist.
I want to give my kids the opportunity to pursue wherever their interests take them, but at the same time, I think most kids could use some pushes to be well rounded. I definitely needed that.
> I know of almost zero kids that enjoy practicing their instrument as a kid yet I believe the majority of adults are happy for the experience. (I have no data tho).
I suspect this is mostly forgetting how miserable the experience of learning was. If learning a musical instrument was net-positive overall, adults would choose to do it. Everyone wants to have learnt an instrument, but no-one wants to put the work in.
Of course, but even if they're not interested in calculus or US history we make them learn that. I just want my kids to be good enough at programming that it's a solid backup option so they can feel free to pursue anything their hearts desire knowing they can fall back on that.
Maybe they can just fall back on having discovered what they're good at, by the time they're 20, because they've had the opportunity to try many things, because their parents recognize that the job of a parent is to help children discover themselves, not fulfill their parents' ideas of success, least of all financial.
Serving at Starbucks may not seem like a 'solid' option to you, but I assure you I've met many more happy people there, than sitting in an 'open-office', being bad at their job, knowing they're bad, and still doing it, because of how 'solid' it is.
having worked at a restaurant before my first programming job, i think i get what you're saying here. i don't mind coding and i'm not bad at it, but i definitely miss the more social aspects of the restaurant job. i can imagine a lot of people being happier day to day there.
i gotta ask though, by the time they are 65 and thinking about their retirement options, who is happier?
‘Maya method’ is just clickbait. This is how most of the rest of the world operates. Kids being the boss is a relatively new phenomenon and probably started and flourished in the western/urban setting. I used to help with household chores until I went to college and all of that came in handy when I started to live on my own when I got my first job. And my mom mostly never asked me to do it, it was just about being part of the household and sharing responsibilities. And yes, I was never paid to do any of it, neither was my mom.
I don't have kids myself but what always amazes me with my friends is the drama when the kids have to go to bed.
One friend doesn't force his kids (3 and 4) to go to bed at a specific time. They can stay awake and play (quietly) for as longs as they want. The only two catches are: they have to stay in their room and they have to get up for kindergarden in the morning. Boom! No more drama. They usually even ask for the light to be turned off after kissing them goodnight. I told other friends about it and they got the same results.
It's probably too late now to make it easy. At that age, I wasn't particularly inspired to do things my parents didn't enjoy doing. This article[0] suggests it's around 1-3 years old (toddlers).
I don't think it's as cut-and-dry as this, but it's perfectly fine to have an orderly household based on loving authority that isn't authoritarian. The pearl-clutching responses insinuating child abuse because you have a well-behaved child are sort of what you'd expect from Standard Internet Conscientiousness, but I hope people don't actually take parenting cues from comment threads.
I really don't understand the necessity for tactics and reverse psychology etc with children. Attempting to be their friend is a major mistake. The parent is the authority figure. Become friends when they are in their twenties.
Parents can love their kids without being their buddy. In fact, the buddy thing often comes from the parent's own unmet need for connection, and that's stressful for the kid. Parents and children are not peers.
It's an authoritarian parenting style, and I don't think anyone really likes it. But there's nothing here to suggest any marginal physical or emotional abuse. I personally know a few traditional Mexican families where the father is addressed as "sir" as a sign of respect but still knows how to care for their children.
Really? from what part of Mexico? I'm Mexican and I've never heard someone addressing their father as "sir" (señor) not even "father" (padre) we usually use "dad" (papá), even using "usted" instead of "tu" is not common anymore. But then again Mexico is a really big and diverse country, so there must be zones where that could happen.
It's interesting because in some parts of Northern Mexico, you would think that use of "tú" didn't exist. NO ONE uses it, not even relatives or husbands and wife.
Hitting disobedient children is also a regional custom.
If your children respond to orders like trained animals or soldiers, they are doing so because they were conditioned to do so. I am choosing to define that conditioning as abusive because it simply doesn't happen naturally.
My dictionary defines abuse as "cruel and violent treatment of a person or animal". What is cruel specifically about setting expectations about what needs to be done? There is nothing cruel about requiring kin to call you sir especially when you can show that you deserve their respect.
There's an interesting assumption being made here, that kids should do chores. I only started doing chores when I started living alone at 17 years old. Would have done chores improved me or my life in any way? The way I see it, there are far more interesting and educative ways to use a kids young years, when their brain is the most plastic. I was never forced, or barely even asked to help with chores, I was actually pretty curious about them. Although I never did chores with any regularity, I learned how to cook, bake and clean just out of curiosity.
Interesting observation. I think it is important to highlight things that are taken for granted. There are seems to be an assumption that there is "the right way" to raise kids and that it should be constant from generation to generation. I'm not so sure that's the case...
I don't think the Mayan people have better long-term outcomes for their kids despite being helpful. My kids are prepping for college. I'll make sure they pick up life skills as they become able.
> Of course, the HN response to that is "my children will earn enough money after college that they can hire cleaners and order UberEats".
Or they won't, and necessity will be their teacher. The point is that it's not obvious whether teaching kids these skills early makes a serious long-term difference in outcomes.
Learning to do things for yourself in general is a huge step towards living within your means, which is a struggle for a majority of Americans. My family has plenty of money to no longer do most things for ourselves - clean, cook, yard work, house maintenance, car maintenance, etc., but I refuse to contract out anything I don't have to because 1) I usually have the free time to do it and am essentially earning money in my free time and 2) that added money goes towards experiences we could not afford if we paid for services we could easily do ourselves.
I much prefer saving the money to use how I want than enjoy extra free time I likely would not use productively.
Being a self-sufficient and well rounded adult is universal, regardless of the superiority some parents seem to have outlined for their college bound kids.
Trust me. If you need so much time 'prepping for college' that you can't spare a few minutes helping out with the house chores, you're not college material.
It's never an 'either chores or college, pick one', and no, people that cook and clean their own home aren't looking for a professional career in that, and cleaners didn't 'choose' that profession because they were conditioned as toddlers to clean.
Prepping might barely get you into some college or might get you to smoothly sail through the best colllege you can find.
I'd prefer my kid would build games or solder or have fun with math or play with physics or chemistry than do the dishes or cook.
Besides, you asked if college is more important than life skills. And yes, it is. So much that even 'prepping' which at such young age is just getting your kid into anything other than mundane is worth more.
Also, life skills are so easy to acquire at later age by anyone with at least mediocre IQ that they basically come free if you mange to raise your kid's IQ by 10 points.
>college is more important than life skills. And yes, it is.
We would have to define "life skills".
I would consider life skills the ability to navigate hierarchies and bureaucracies (like the DMV, or dealing with bosses). I would also include knowing how to deal with challenges like a broken down vehicle. Balancing a checkbook, cleanliness, halfway decent nutritional sense.
But hey, as long as you got that PhD in Russian literature, I'm sure everything will turn out fine.
I don't think sacrificing your kids on an altar in front of the whole city is the best strategy for getting them to do chores. But maybe I'm old school.
When your children are young it's easier to just to tasks yourself than to try and get your children to do it, they'll break things and make mistakes in the course of learning.
But that's how you learn. I had to cook dinner once a week from the age of around 12. Sure my parents had a few shit dinners when I started out and sometimes I made a massive mess (or set things on fire!), but I learned how to cook and bake. Same goes for any other household tasks.
Of course, the other secret to the Maya Method is La Chancla: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/04/361205792...