But Moooooomm......

Household chores, farm chores (feeding animals, gathering eggs, things like that), and maintenance chores (mowing, moving brush, burning brush, fixing fences). Nothing horrid, but definitely had some things I hated.

I don't live on a farm, so I have my kids do dishwasher, cat box, trash, and bedroom chores. They also have to clean their own goddamn bathroom.

 

I feel like a worthless asshole now, but I didn't do shit while I was growing up. The most I ever did was cleaning my room and busing my plate after I was done eating.

The thing is, now that I come home on leave and do the adult thing of helping out, my mom is a complete control freak and yells at me when I do chores. I don't think I've done anything right despite my good intentions. Bring the plates out of the dishwasher and stack them in the cupboard? They're in the wrong place. Clean the counter off? "WHERE DID THE SPONGE GO WHAT DID YOU DO WITH MY STUFF TELL ME NOW"

So in my defense, my mom has never been amenable to me doing household chores. I did a lot of yardwork, though. Hauling mulch, mowing the lawn, clearing brush and stumps of dead trees, digging up rocks in her garden. I enjoy landscaping because of it.

 

I grew up with three brothers, and still had a TON of housework. My little brother didn't do shit, my oldest brother was out of the house by the time I was old enough to do most chores, and my next oldest brother made it a point to never, ever be home to be made to do anything, so the bulk of the chores and housework fell to me. I had the usual, like taking out the garbage and cleaning the house, not to mention cleaning the garage and raking leaves, but the job I had on a weekly basis in the summer that I HATED was mowing the lawn. Our lawn was big for a suburb, but not so big we could justify a riding mower, so we just had a crappy push mower. It'd take me a solid two hours to cover the entire lawn. I'd try to listen to CDs on my portable CD player, but they'd skip too much. On rare occasions my older brother let me use his walkman to listen to music, but otherwise it was just two hours of pushing a mower and wanting to kill myself out of boredom.

Now that I have my own house, I don't mind it as much. I attribute that almost entirely to listening to podcasts. My yard, though, looks like garbage from the previous owners complete and total lack of attention, not to mention the fact that its only rained twice in the past month and a half. The previous owner had a riding mower that they used twice a month (according to my neighbors), and they never put down seed, fertilizer, or anything else, so there are large dead patches that two years of work still hasn't completely gotten rid of. Having a kid this year has made it even tougher.

 

My roommate is the same way. It used to be he would get blazed and when stoned, he found cleaning to be awesome. Now he just enjoys it as a weekend activity. It is definitely going to keep our new place clean.

Growing up, I did a decent amount of chores, but nothing huge. My mom is a machine when it comes to things like laundry, so even still if I go home with clothes, she does it cause I'll just slow down her process. My dad always says a house will be as clean as the person with the highest standard of cleanliness. That was my mom by a long shot, she hated clutter. We didn't clean our bathrooms cause it wouldn't be clean enough for her and she'd just redo it anyways. I did clean my room though, usually after my mom asked me again and again.

The majority of my "chores" were outdoor yard shit with my dad. And I HATED it. Mowing the lawn was fun for 2 summers after I was first allowed to driving lawn mower, then that got old. Pulling weeds, trimming, and my least favorite activity of my entirehood...shoveling mulch. FUCK THAT. To this day I still hate the sight of mulch. My dad always said he loved yardwork after sitting in an office all day. Well I've been sitting in an office the last 4 years and I still hate that shit. Then again, my Dad never worked out.

 

Seems like I'm the odd man out here. I didn't do shit growing up. My mother wouldn't allow it, and the few times I was told, I didn't bother. It was a combination of laziness and faux rebellion.

In my adult years I've found cleaning house to be quite relaxing. I rather enjoy it.

 

Count me in as another person whose mother wouldn't allow help. Our house was so neat and clean it was like growing up in a museum. When I'm over there, I still hesitate to touch anything. My mom would probably be diagnosed as OCD, and any time my brother or I did anything around the house it was Not Good Enough. She would become frustrated or annoyed with us and do it herself, berating our job the entire time. Actually, my parents have had a cleaning lady come bi-weekly for the last 10+ years. My mom cleans the house top to bottom the day before they come. She's never missed cleaning for the cleaning people. Why are they even paying people to do it? The house is spotless.

In lieu of chores my brother and I worked.

 

a rep brought this up....
Did your parents use chores as part of punishment? Like, "You did/didn't do XXXXXX so you have to do extra XXXXXX this week"?
I don't remember if mine did or not to be honest, but I know that I don't.

I don't use chores as punishment...I've taught my kids to view them as something that simply needs to be done. We eat, therefore the dishes need to be cleaned. We have cats, so the furniture needs to be vacuumed and the cat box changed/scooped out regularly, we have waste, so the trash must be changed. I don't want a negative connotation with any of those things, so instead I try to teach them to be matter of fact about it and simply view it as part of life and responsible living.

 

I do. Pulling weeds in 100+ temps, washing all the baseboards, polishing the kitchen cabines with a wood conditioner thats a 3 step process, they all suck and give a healthy amount of time to think about what they did/didn't do. But note these are all outside of normal chores.

 

Oh god. Please don't let this turn into another "I parent better than you parent!!" thread. PLEASE.

Ahem.

I was responsible for keeping my room clean growing up. Once I got older, I had to mow the grass with our push mower, because my dad thought the rider mower was too dangerous. Cue the dog lead getting caught in the blade, causing the mower to flip over and the lead to slice my ankle. From that point on, I got to use the rider mower.

During the summer, when I was home alone all day, I would have a list of chores to do before my mom got home. Vacuum, do the dishes, clean up the dog poop...things like that. I would also have to shovel the driveway when it snowed. When I moved out is when my dad finally got a snowblower. Thanks dad.

 

Makes sense. Outside of normal chores I can see using or doing.
Living in an apartment, I have no weeds to make them pull.

 

I fall into the "my mom was a clean freak and we weren't given chores because we'd never do them right, so instead we were expected to be gainfully employed by the age of 14" category.

The boyfriend, however, had his list of chores to do growing up - apparently one of them was being 'forced' to do the dishes every day. As a result of this, he abjectly refuses to have anything to do with hand-washing dishes ever again. He'll load and unload a dishwasher, he'll dry the dishes when they're in the rack. But if I ask him to "just give that pot a quick wash"? He just looks at me in disgust and leaves the room. It's actually kinda funny.

I have seriously toyed with the idea of hiring a cleaning service. I hate cleaning the house.

 

I didn't do shit besides cleaning up after myself, shoveling in the winter and helping weed and spread mulch in spring. Now I'm pretty useless at domestic and maintenance tasks besides cooking.

In my last roommate situation we had a twice a month maid that cleaned EVERYTHING including dirty dishes and did a good job. She was costing us $60 each a month which was a steal considering each of us had our own bathroom, a large bedroom and there were two huge living rooms. As I was moving out they decided to discontinue service to save money. Now mind you these were 25+ year old guys with real jobs, they went to the bar every weekend and ordered out pretty much every meal during the week, they were also slobs. I went back one day to pick up some mail that was sent there and the house looked like it was occupied by hoarders and smelled like a dumpster, because they didn't want to pony up $60, idiots.

If for whatever reason I do end up living with roommates again or move into a bigger place there is no way I'm not having a cleaning lady. Cleaning is such a time suck, I remember spending whole Sundays cleaning when we lived in a bigger place. Also with roommates divvying up chores is a pain, it's so worth the money to not have to deal with or argue about who is suppose to what when.

 

There were a variety of "chore systems" at play in my house, owing partially to the fact that my mother likes to redesign stuff, and partially to the fact that there were different numbers of kids home at different points.

The only one I really didn't like was cleaning the litterbox, which inevitably fell on me. That, and seasonal chores like cleaning the backyard, because it basically took an entire weekend of all of us being yelled at to do things better.

When I was in 9th grade I did laundry for me and my father, and some of my mother's stuff. It wasn't too bad, except that I had to wheel everything down to the laundromat on Sunday mornings, which were prime, prime basketball times. Nothing goes slower than watching a dryer tumble while you know that people are getting in good runs. Also, the laundromat had a Marvel vs. Capcom game in the corner, but I never, ever used quarters designated for laundry to play it.


(shhhh yes i did)

 

I know I will get shit for this, but hear me out.

I grew up as an expatriate in (in order) Singapore, Vietnam, Thailand, Singapore (home in Sweden a year) then finally Singapore before graduating from High School and moving from home, moving to Sweden again. I was extremely privileged growing up, but I was never the "rich kid". The majority of kids I went to school with were more well off- I went to International Schools, never local. Up until I moved out, I have always had one or two maids. In Vietnam we had a driver and gardener, as well (fixed stuff around the house, full time employed). Having said that, I was always expected to handle my own shit. I may not have cooked, but I always cleared the table. I never had to do laundry, but I sorted it and put it in the right place. And so on. Not difficult chores, but enough to teach me perspective. I was never given a large allowance, we taught me to respect money. It also taught me how to skimp on lunch in order to have enough money for booze on the weekends, a very admirable trait. But when I moved out, I knew how to cook well, do my own laundry and take of shit around the house.

My point is, I agree fully with making children do chores, and it is easy to think that just because one is well off, one will be spoilt, not respect money, etc, etc. But you do not need to grow up in an extremely difficult situation just to have a strong work ethic, or know how to do laundry.

 

Daily: Make your own bed, make sure your clothes are in the hamper, clean up after your own pets (had everything from a dog to turtles to snakes to hermit crabs) and make sure they have food and water, pick your stuff off the floor.

Nightly: I have an older sister, we rotated dish duty. Every other night one of us would set the table. That night, the person got to dry the dishes, if not your night, then you washed them. Trust me, I loved it when they got a dishwasher! But pots and pans were (and still are to this day) hand washed and dried.

Weekly: Saturday was "chore day". We each had to dust, either dust mop or vacuum (moved when I was between 5th & 6th grade to someplace with carpeting!) your room, and whatever area of the house you were assigned. And that meant dusting! Take each item off, wipe it down, use Pledge on all wood surfaces, put the freaking doilies, everything back. Rotated cleaning "our" bathroom (if you got stuck with the living room/dining room dusting, you didn't have to clean the bathroom, but you did have to dust the entire basement of the ranch or split level, and clean the "guest" half bath in either place). She did the laundry, but you were expected to fold it and put it away.

No leaving the house on Saturday until your chores were done. Have a T-ball game, wanna go swimming/skating/whatever? Better make sure you wake your ass up, or you're missing the game/whatever you wanna do.

I did get an allowance, but if I tried to skimp on stuff, it would be cut by however much she thought I skimped on. Punishment? Yeah, you screwed up, so this week you get to... Sweep the garage, pull weeds, wash her car (which was actually fun), whatever she could think of that needed done.

My parents got divorced when I was 9, when mom remarried and we moved when I was 11, I learned how to cook. To this day, I'm still a better cook than my mother, and she'll admit it. As far as laundry? I now fold it as soon as it comes out of the dryer or hang it up. She did that with *her* stuff, let us figure it out own our own.