A Spoonful of Sugar. Liz Fraser
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As I pass through Granny’s creaky iron gate the next morning on my way to talk with her about the importance of Home Sweet Home, I have a nasty run-in with a wild and exceptionally vicious climbing rose. This unpleasant altercation results in part of my left ear looking like Mike Tyson didn’t get enough breakfast, and, wiping the blood into an old scrap of Costa Coffee tissue I find squashed in my pocket, I decide that I will have to tidy the garden up a little for Granny before either she or I kill ourselves tripping over a flowerpot or getting lost forever in the bindweed.
To my great surprise, Granny accepts my offer of horticultural help (I have offered innumerable times to tidy her house up a little and have been met on each of these awkward occasions with bristling mutterings about it being fine, and what nonsense, and couldn’t I just sit down and have a cup of tea) and puts me to task immediately with the somewhat vague instruction to ‘clear up that messy patch of the left flowerbed and leave the buddleias some room to breathe’.
I can’t tell if it’s the excitement of being let loose in the garden, the pleasure of doing a job for someone else or the quiet revenge I seek on that blasted rose, but either way within half an hour I find myself standing next to a pile almost as tall as I am of what I assume to be bindweed, grinning broadly at my heroic efforts and sweating profusely despite the autumn chill. I am doubly pleased with my efforts, because this bindweed had been smothering to the point of suffocation a rather attractive bush with thick, dark green leaves, which my hard work has spectacularly exposed. Granny will be so pleased.
I am just on my way to the bonfire, my arms full of metre upon metre of the nasty, smothering weed, when Granny hobbles gingerly out of the porch to take a look at my efforts.
There is an unexpected and rather unnerving silence, as she inspects first the sizeable hole I have just created in the flowerbed, and then what I am holding.
‘Oh!’ she says at long, long last, looking at the mass of greenery in my arms. ‘I see you’ve taken out my favourite Clematis.’
This story is not so much to demonstrate how rubbish I am at gardening – though for anyone who invites me round for the weekend that’s a warning worth knowing – as to bring us to the troublesome issue of chores.
I remember doing chores around the house when I was a child: setting and clearing the table a little, making my bed (badly) and tidying up my room occasionally – though mainly this involved shoving everything into my cupboard. My brother and I also did odd jobs for our grandparents when we were there – washing the car, fetching the groceries, getting the newspapers in the morning, that kind of thing.
We weren’t saints and we did do some of this for money rather than out of the goodness of our own hearts, but we still had chores and we did them, and so did many adults of my age when they were kids.
After I’ve cleaned myself up a bit and feel I can face Granny again, we settle down for our daily chat, and I get straight to the subject of the day: household chores. I am fairly sure she would have been given her fair share as a child, and would have set her own wee ones to task as well. In what looks set to be the theme of the day, I am proved wrong yet again.
‘Oh, I’m afraid I’m going to disappoint you, Elizabeth – because we had absolutely no chores at all! We got up as late as possible, we played a lot, and we had a lovely time. Chores were not a thing for us as children. We were just children!’
I am dumbfounded. I expected a list as long as my arm of jobs they were made to do; not quite shimmying up the chimney, but the more daily domestic chores like cooking, washing and so on. I imagined that’s what childhood was like ‘back then’ when times were tough, kids were disciplined, no meant no and sweeties cracked your teeth before they had a chance to rot them.
‘But, I thought you would be doing lots of things to help your mum around the house. Wasn’t that what all the discipline, and the “do as you’re told, work hard” ethic was all about?’
‘No, not at all,’ she corrects, opening the door a little to let Mica, her small ginger and white cat, out. ‘Doing things to help others was just assumed. It was part of respecting others, and doing your bit. But they weren’t chores, or jobs, and we weren’t asked to do them. We loved our mother, and we had huge respect for her and our father, but we didn’t need to do chores for them, to show this respect. We just behaved well, and were polite – and mainly tried to stay out of trouble!’
Granny’s Pearl of Wisdom
The housework is not part of a child’s life at all.
They should be free to play while they can.
All of this surprises me so much that even I am silenced for a few moments. It dawns on me that maybe I’ve been wrong all this time to try and get my kids to help with the washing up, to fold away their clothes and to scrub the kitchen floor till I can see my face in it. (OK, not that last one. Jeeez, you were calling the police weren’t you?)
So maybe Granny is right, and that the concerns many of we parents have to try and instil a ‘work ethic’ in our children, to make sure they ‘chip in’, pull their weight, stop taking us for granted and jolly well pull their finger out on the home front is entirely counterproductive.
Maybe letting kids be kids, and simply raising them to do things for others because they instinctively understand and feel it’s the right thing to do, rather than insisting they make their bed and put away their own clothes aged five, is a better way to go.
Granny and her sister were allowed to play. They were children, and they had freedom, and time and opportunities to play in a way kids today can only dream of.
While this does sound fantastically idyllic, and something we should all strive to provide for our kids today, I do have to disagree a little with Granny here. I think that, after the age of six or so kids should be asked to help out at home a little bit. Teaching kids to muck in and appreciate what we do for them by giving them some jobs to do themselves, not only makes them realise how much work there is to do around the house, and how much effort goes into looking after a family, but it also teaches them a lot of useful skills for later life. I wouldn’t know how to change a bed in two minutes flat if I hadn’t had to strip and make my own for years as a child! Nor would I be able to cook, or clean a bathroom properly, or iron a shirt well if I hadn’t watched my mother do it a million times, and then had a go myself.
But I do like the idea that children helping out at home was just done if it was seen to be necessary, without them being chivvied along every twenty minutes with a ‘do this’, ‘do that’ attitude, and it’s one I decided there and then to try and adopt a bit more for my own children. Helping out because you want to, because you respect the person you are helping, is a much better way to be going about it.
Childhood is a time for playing and learning through play, not doing household chores.
Children should respect their parents enough that they help out instinctively, not because they are told to.
–––– LIZ’S TIPS ––––
Some degree of helping out around the house is a good thing, as it teaches children to value what you do for them, and gives them the skills they’ll need one day to look after themselves.
Don’t start the ‘chores’ too young. A child of five doesn’t need to set the table, but one of nine can easily put her own clothes