Work is a Four-Letter Word
“Home is the place where, when you have to go there, they have to take you in.”
Robert Frost
Getting kids to learn to work was one of my most frustrating of all parental responsibilities. The truth is that I am astonished all my children are employed at the moment—well, mostly all, anyway. You’d think that having a bunch of kids was a sure bet to whip through Saturday morning chores. But the actual fact turned out to be dramatically different. For my kids, “work” was a four-letter word.
Daughter #1, now a PhD in psychology, once told me that kids need incentives to make good choices. I asked her why that was different than bribery. She said bribery involves reward for negative behavior. Hmmm. . . Negative behavior was certainly what I had been getting when she and her siblings were young.
Over the years, I tried job charts, poker chips, pick-a-job from the jar, you-can’t-go-to-the birthday/dance/game until your chores are done, etc. Everything worked a couple of times. Nothing worked longer than that. Once the manager at Albertsons caught me staring through the freezer doors at 16-year-old Son #1 loading milk onto the shelves. When his boss asked me what I was doing, I told him the truth. “I’m not sure I’ve ever seen my son work voluntarily,” I said. “I just like the view.” He thought I was kidding.
Of course, there were exceptions. Son #3 got a job at Chris and Dick’s when he was 15. His boss told him they hired him because they’d never had a teen-ager apply for a job with a resume before. Son #3 worked with a team of ex-cons from the local half-way house assembling cabinets for a couple of years. He loved it. Which explains why he fit right in later when he supplemented his residency salary at the U of U hospital working a few weekends a month as the Doc the Country Jail.
But of all my children, Son #6 was the most difficult to convince that he needed to contribute to the general welfare of the family by doing his share of the work. Part of the problem was that he was too dang smart. When his oldest two siblings were on missions simultaneously, we had a kid assigned to dishes for every night of the week but one. (My husband and I handled Sunday.) That meant Son #6 needed to join the labor pool to fill that empty spot. Up until that point, getting assigned a regular rotation for kitchen duty was a cause for grumbling and complaint, but Son #6 took the resistance to a whole new level.
First, he surveyed his siblings still at home and discovered not one of them had been assigned dish duty until they were eight years old. He was only seven. “Maybe next year,” he told me when I wrote his name on the job chart. I ignored him. That turned out to be a mistake.
Every Wednesday night when it was his turn to do the dishes, he laid on the rug in front of the sink and yelled about management being unfair to labor. Once he even made a protest sign. But he couldn’t spell either ‘management’ or ‘labor’, so he had to read the sign to me in order for me to get the point. For weeks on end, I tried to force him to do his job, and he’d just stare at me from his prone position on the rug. He was totally disinterested in the fact that I had the power, and he was only a kid. I got sucked into an argument with him virtually every single week. Usually, I’d end up so disgusted with the whole thing, I’d send him to bed about 10 pm with the job unfinished because he had school the next day. On one memorable occasion, I lost my temper and grabbed a wooden spoon, fully intending to throttle him with it. He yanked it out of my hand, broke it in half over his knee, and said, “Well, I guess you won’t try that again.”
Finally, at my wits end, I accidently stumbled over my future psychologist Daughter #1’s advice: “OK. You win,” I yelled. “What is it you want in exchange for doing this job?”
He didn’t miss a beat. “I want an ice cream sandwich when I finish the dishes. Every week.” Clearly, he’d been heading there all along
The very next morning, I went to Albertson’s and bought two big boxes of ice cream sandwiches. That night he did the dishes, smiling through the whole job. When he was done, he didn’t say a word. He looked straight at me, pulled a sandwich out of the freezer, gobbled down the whole thing in two minutes flat, and licked his fingers as he finished. I just sighed in relief.
He’s almost 36 years old now, and there are still ice cream sandwiches in the freezer. Who knows when I might need him to roto-till the garden or wipe the latest mal-ware off my computer? At least I’ll have something to barter with.