The Value of Chores

One of the benefits of chores is that crushes children's sense of entitlement. It also helps them understand that all the material comforts we enjoy today don’t arise magically.

Last year, my friend and former colleague Annie Holmquist wrote a thoughtful article on the importance of chores after reading an NPR article. Here is an excerpt.

The other day, NPR wrote a feature article about a unique program at John Bowne High School in New York City. Despite being in the heart of one of the biggest metropolises in the United States, John Bowne runs an agricultural program for upwards of 500 students.

Known as “Aggies,” these students “grow crops, care for livestock and learn the rudiments of floriculture, viticulture, aquaculture, biotechnology and entrepreneurship.”

The article describes the work these students from Queens were doing on a chilly winter morning in New York.

“It’s Monday, 8 a.m., and these teens have already mucked stalls in the barn and fed the goats, alpacas and miniature cows. They’ve rounded up eggs in the henhouse, harvested cabbages and a few green-tinged tomatoes, and arranged them in tidy tiers to sell in the Agriculture Store. Now they’re ready to put in a full day of classes.”

Now, NPR writer Lela Nargi states that that program is an excellent idea because “agriculture is a booming industry” and participating students “accumulate a wide variety of hands-on experience with which they can land a job in the agriculture sector, a job which may even pull their families out of poverty.”

These words rang hollow to me. They resembled something my 12-year-old daughter would write on an assignment to explain the purpose of an event or fact she just learned about in history class. (Nargi is a veteran journalist, not a pre-teen child.)

There’s something coldly utilitarian in looking at a scene of a bunch of kids mucking barns collecting eggs in a henhouse and concluding that the value of that work is that it might help some of them one day “pull their families out of poverty.”

Let’s be honest: How many of these children will ever step foot in a barn again after the course concludes, let alone launch a career in agriculture? Not many, I suspect.

But that doesn’t mean their experience isn’t valuable, and Annie touches on this in her article, suggesting that career utility should not be the primary purpose of such programs.

“I think there’s a deeper reason why more schools – both urban and rural – should consider [such programs],” she writes. “In a nutshell, [the promote] what one might call a ‘chore culture,’ a culture which instills hard work, responsibility, and the knowledge of basic skills which today’s society has lost.”

The idea that chores of any kind (farm work or kitchen drudgery) should be incorporated into schooling is likely suspect to many readers. Modern schooling is about learning to read, doing maths, studying history, and cracking the sciences (and in more recent years, offering a health dose of moral education on social justice).

I never liked this view of school, and the Montessori school we selected for my daughter was chosen in large part because it emphasized practical education like chores. For several years, things like wiping down tables, loading dishes, sweeping floors, and other menial tasks were incorporated into my daughter’s daily schooling routine.

Call me old-fashioned, but I think chores teach children important lessons. Annie agrees. In a separate article, she points out that chores build confidence and “crush self-esteem.”

Crushing a child’s “self-esteem” might sound like a bad thing, but Annie makes it clear she’s not talking about destroying a child’s confidence or sense of worth. Instead, she references a book by Laurie and Johannah Bluedorn (Teaching the Trivium) that suggests these chores are designed to teach children what we might call humility.

Your child needs to esteem himself lower than others, beginning with his parents. He can gather the clothes for laundry, and he can fold the laundry. Then he can do the laundry. He can set the table and wash the dishes. Then he can help fix the meals. He can vacuum the floor and dust the furniture. Then he can wash the windows.

…

If you do all of this for him, then he will develop a notion of self-esteem: ‘I am so important that everyone ought to do things for me.’ But if he learns to do it for himself, then he will develop a notion of self-confidence: ‘I can do it myself.’ And if he learns to do it for you, then he will develop a notion of self-usefulness: ‘I can be helpful, and I am needed around here.’

In other words, one of the benefits of chores is that crushes one’s sense of entitlement (a better word in my opinion than esteem, at least in our modern understanding of the words).

This is one reason I celebrate and embrace the chore culture Annie describes, and it’s why I routinely task my children with unloading and loading the dishwasher. (My wife and I also continually work to find other chores for them, even though it’s usually easier to do it ourselves.)

It’s not the only reason, however. I also want my children to understand that our material comforts don’t arise magically. They require work. They require action.

This brings me back to the NPR article and the children in Queens mucking barn stalls and collecting eggs from hens.

I don’t expect many of these children to go on to become farmers or barn hands. Nor do I expect many of them to find careers in a “booming agricultural industry.”

But I do hope and expect that many of them will reflect on their experience the next time they go to the grocery store with mom or dad and buy a dozen eggs, and they’ll have a newfound appreciation of how those eggs arrived there.

Better understanding the work that goes into the products all around is something I think all Americans could benefit from.