A Spoonful of Sugar. Liz Fraser

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      ‘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.

      

GRANNY’S TIPS

      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 away!

Routine, routine, routine

      When I left home at the grand old age of seventeen I felt a colossal sense of loss. Really, it was like having a huge hole ripped out of my stomach, and I felt totally rootless for a while. Of course, I loved that I was finally going out into the great big world by myself – that was the most exhilarating feeling ever for an adventurous sort like me, and as soon as I could I packed a huge rucksack and set off around the world on my own for six months – but leaving the place I grew up in was a painful wrench and when my parents sold the place a decade or so ago I couldn’t even go back to help them with the move. It had to stay in my mind just as it was: patterns in the cracked paint that had been there for years making shapes that became my companions, of strange faces, animals or faraway islands; marks on the walls where, in a moment of wilfulness, I’d scribbled the name of someone I fancied; the smell of the lounge carpet in the sunshine; the reflection of the bay window on the top of the piano – all of it had to remain just like that.

      What made me so attached to my home was, oddly enough, not the people who were there (they are still around, even though they’re in a new place now), but the incredibly strong sense of routine that was present: every day, from the age of six, I’d get up at the same time, catch the school bus at the same time, come home at the same time, have dinner, a bath, go to bed, read and sleep. Weekends were for music lessons and СКАЧАТЬ