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Hey you guys, this is Heidi St. John. Welcome to my little corner of the Internet. Today is Monday, September 23rd this is episode number 822.  It’s mailbox Monday. Today we’re going to talk a little bit about chores and children and what it takes to raise a healthy adult. 

Stick around, I think you’re going to be encouraged.

Thanks for tuning in today. I cannot go through the day without wishing happy birthday to my oldest daughter who turns 28 today. Savannah, you are a joy and I’m so excited to see what the Lord has for you. Savannah and Ryan are expecting our third grandchild this spring—we’re excited about that and we’re going to have a great day to day celebrating the beautiful person that is Savannah. 

A couple of things—it is coming into Christmas card season and I thought I would give you guys a heads up this year because last year I was too late. We love to hear from you and here at Firmly Planted Family, we love to see your pictures. We’d love to get your Christmas cards. I’m going to start going on a little Christmas card campaign asking if you can send pictures of your family and maybe drop us a note about what the podcast has meant to you. We’d love to hear from you. I know that you don’t have your Christmas cards ready — I’m just giving you a heads up. I know I said the “C”word, I said Christmas, I realize it’s still September, but last year I was late so this year I thought I would would be early. Your welcome. 

I also want to let you guys know that we’re coming up on a brand new season of my women’s conference and I cannot wait to have you guys participating in that and coming to that, it will be all over the United States this coming year. The conference is called Faith That Speaks. If you haven’t noticed, the culture is struggling. Look around you. The questions keep coming. Where are the answers? 

Here and around the world, the need for healing is great, but in the midst of one of the most spiritually challenging times in human history, God’s people have seemed to have forgotten who they are. I’m going to spend this year reminding you that you are who God says you are and then encouraging you to have a faith that speaks. We have become afraid to speak about the hope of Jesus and instead we’ve allowed ourselves and our message to be silenced. As the church has lost its voice, the world has lost its way. Jesus knew this would happen. Right after Paul exhorts us to put on the full armor of God he says this: “To that end, keep alert with all perseverance” Remember, we’ve talked about this before. Perseverance is patience in action. So he says: “…keep alert with all perseverance”. So you don’t stop, you keep alert with all your patience and action. You persevere. That’s patience and action. You make supplication, meaning you ask the Lord for His help “for all the saints”. 

I’m going to say this to you again as sort of 2019 speak: To that end, stay alert, keep your eyes open, demonstrate patience in action while you asked the Lord to help God’s people. Then he says: pray for me. This is the apostle Paul and if he needed prayer for goodness sake, I need it. And If Paul needed prayer: Dad— you need it. Mom— you need it. Teenagers— you need it. He says: pray for me “that words may be given to me in opening my mouth boldly to proclaim the mystery of the gospel, for which I am an ambassador in chains, that I may declare it boldly, as I ought to speak.”

The psalmist said: “Let the redeemed of the Lord… say so.”. That’s what we’re going to do. I want to encourage you, come on and join me any place you see my women’s conference Faith That Speaks and learn how you too can boldly proclaim the mystery of the Gospel as God would have us to open our mouth to declare the truth of the Word of God. The world is perishing all around us and they need to hear from those of us who have the hope of Jesus Christ. You can see where I’m already scheduled to do it. If you would like to bring my women’s conference to your neck of the woods, reach out to us, let us know and we would love to hear from you. There is a speaker tab at HeidiStJohn.com and you can let us know that you’re interested in bringing my women’s conference to your neck of the woods. It really is a day of equipping and encouraging God’s people. We’re going to open up the Word of God and we’re gonna dig in together, we’re gonna have lunch together, we’re gonna do a Q&A, we’re going to worship together. It is wonderful. It is life changing. 

Speaking of the wonderful life changing power of Jesus, Faith is Speaks will be in Vancouver, Washington on Saturday, October 12th tickets are on sale for that right now. I want to encourage you to do that. The weekend after that I will be in Lincoln, Nebraska. My speaking schedule is slowly winding to a close. I hope you guys will come out and join us. We can’t wait to see you. 

You guys know, I love to hear your questions. If you want to submit a question, you can do it by finding me online at HeidiStjohn.com/MailBoxMonday. There’s a form for you to fill out that’s going to help us be more efficient in just filtering your questions. We’d love to hear from you. 

All right, let’s get to today’s question. It comes from Sarah and she says: Heidi, I love listening to your podcast. You have been giving me sanity now for several years. Well, thank you Sarah. I don’t. I think that might be stretching it, but thank you. I am raising five children ages 12 down to one and have a question about chores. At what point did chores become helpful and are they ever not helpful? I have a friend who says that my kids should be enjoying their childhood, not sitting at home doing work that I am supposed to be doing.

A couple things right off the top of my head. First of all, it makes me really mad when people talk like that to moms. This idea that when you train your children to help you around the house, somehow that’s abusive. Somehow your child’s not being able to enjoy being a child. That’s ridiculous. I rebuke it right now. So don’t even listen to that. It’s ridiculous. What you’ve got to remember, and this is what I think probably more than any other topic that I talked to you about parents and this becomes very divisive because we live in a permissive culture right now. 

Your children need to do chores. 

The goal here isn’t to raise a great kid. The goal is to raise a healthy, well-adjusted, awesome adult. You’re not raising kids. That’s my husband’s always telling me— Heidi, we’re not raising kids, we’re raising adults. We’re trying to get them through their childhood with as little regret as possible. We want them to enjoy their childhood and I want them to play—part of the way that we accomplish that is by unplugging them from all their electronic devices, from not sitting in front of the TV all the time. I think what’s happened is in the culture—we’re giving our kids devices. Here’s your iPad and your phone and here’s some video games and here’s this and here’s that. We’re not giving them chores. I think what we should be doing, frankly, is the opposite. I’d say let’s unplug them from all these devices as much as possible and then encourage them to go outside, encourage them to read books, encourage them to engage with chores.

I’m going to talk about age appropriate chores for just a minute. We’ll start with little ones and get all the way up to adults. Our kids need to be helping us around the house and your kids don’t need to like it. Frankly parents, it might be harder for you to teach your kids to help you than it is just to do it yourself. In fact, I can almost guarantee that it’ll be faster. You’ll get the job done faster and it’ll be easier. It’ll be less stressful if you just send your kid off with an iPad and you clean the kitchen, but you’re actually helping with your kid’s development when they start taking on household chores. They can do this from as little as two years old. I blogged about this several years ago at The Busy MOm and I was shocked and dismayed, frankly at the backlash.

All these parents who were like— I can’t believe you’re doing that. You’d make a two year old help you around house? Yes, I would. What’s really interesting to me is when I started having my two-year-olds helped me, they felt like they were an essential part of our family. There are lots and lots of chores that a child can do that helps train them and grow them up and mature them so they can get from one milestone to the next. Depending on the age they can be doing something as simple as helping you wash the baseboards, or dusting. My little ones loved it when I gave them a desk cloth. Occasionally I’d give them a very small spray bottle. Today my kid’s dust with their Thieves Cleaner, which I love it because it has that cinnamon in it and everything smells so good and I know it’s good for them. I might have my grandsons helping me around the house if they’re over. There’s going to be things they can do and things they can’t do. If you’ve got a two year old, they can be helping you sort laundry. This is teaching them sorting the clothes by color, put the grays together, the blues together, the whites together. What you’re doing is you’re training them to help you with laundry. Also, you’re giving them some sensory development that’s good for them. If you’ve got an infant, like you’ve got a brand new baby and a two year old, I had always loved to to say to my two year old — Can you bring Mama the wipeys? Can you go bring this for the baby? They feel like they’re a valuable part of helping you take care of their little brother or sister.

I think it’s important for you to be able to do that and not to listen to people who would tell you that you’re going to mess your kids up if you give them chores. One thing I have learned over 28 years of parenting is that the more chores my children do and the more I say— good job, I’m so proud of you—it actually boosts their self esteem and they’re happier. They really are happier. Children should be doing chores. I understand that it’s controversial, but really it shouldn’t be. There are some parents who will openly say that their kids are too busy for chores or that their job is school. Can I just tell you right now that is a bunch of baloney. Chores are good for kids and we all did, or at least we should have been doing chores when we were in school. 

I was talking to one of my adult kids the other day and he was talking about how busy his life was now and he’s working and going to school and paying his own bills and stuff like that. Well, what would have happened if I had just thrown him out of the home at 18 years old—not giving him any training for that at all? So our children, when they begin to be a certain age—16 years old— if they want to start driving, they pay for their car insurance. How do they do that? Well, they either get a job themselves or I hire them to do things that are outside the normal scope of things that we do in our home. So in other words, I’m not going to pay my kids for things like help with unload the dishwasher and run your laundry through and let’s vacuum. I would pay them however for— Hey, can you help me unbury myself from the mess that I’ve made in the garage? Or can you help me pressure wash? Things that, that fall outside the normal scope of running a house.

So chores are good for kids. If it’s part of a routine that they get into, they learn to help you run the household. It helps them develop an awareness of the needs of people and you’re helping them see that they’re necessary to the family. It’s never been more important than it is right now to say— let’s have your kids help you around the house with chores. I’ve got a bunch of things I’ve written about this extensively over the years. I wrote about it in Becoming MomStrong. I believe in age appropriate chores for children, but just because your child is little or just because your child is bigger doesn’t mean that you make excuses for them not to be helping. I want my kids to be helping with other things that they see around them, beyond what’s happening at our house. That means that you’re teaching your children about the preciousness of other people.That starts very, very early. In fact, the University of Minnesota 20 year study found that the best predictor of adult success… wait for it… was based on if they had began doing chores at an early age. This is as young as three. It’s never too late to start. You can make it fun. There’s a great article and I’ll link back to them and quote a little bit of that today. They say: Make it fun. Kids get excited as they draw their next chore from a container of labeled popsicle sticks. It reduces anxiety of helping them to help out around the house. Then we want to give them a reward. So if you want to give your kids a little bit of screen time, that takes the guilt out of it because your kids are earning screen time. 

Can I just say right now—that would not be my favorite reward for them. I would rather have it be something that’s relational in nature. I’m going to link back to some Chore Cards for You. There are some wonderful books that I will link back to you. I love making chore charts. I think they work for a little while and then you might have a harder time. We make this wonderful Chore Chart and all you guys can download it off of my blog. I also want to say that when you do that, be prepared that what works for you in September might not work for you in January. So you gotta be prepared that it might work for a little while and then maybe your kids get bored and you’ll need to do something different. We want our kids to learn to work around the house. That should never be something that we’re questioning as parents today. 

I read an article that started started with this line: 25 year old man-child moves back home. We hear about these things in the news all the time. It says: I recently had a conversation with a friend who was complaining that his 25 year old son had recently moved back into their two bedroom condo because he had nowhere else to live. My friend, the father, said, if it was up to him, he wouldn’t let it happen. But the wife’s motherly instincts were way too strong for him to allow him to have his way and his way was to kick out the man-child out of the house. So the dad wanted to kick the kid out. The mom was like, no, I want him to come home because he’s our child.

This is a common problem. Children falling back on their parents because they can’t stand on their own two feet in the real world past 21 years of age. It’s a source of a lot of frustration for a lot of parents that I know. I’m not saying that your kids aren’t gonna have moments when they need help. We all do that. That’s understandable. Maybe they’re in college and maybe they need help for just a little bit and they move out for a while, but then it didn’t work and they move back home. So there’s a big difference between failure to launch and a little bit of a rough start.I want to just encourage you, remember what I said before, the goal is not to raise great kids. The goal is to raise kids who will become great adults.

What this means is that everything that a parent does in the process of raising a child is supposed to be done with the ultimate goal of instilling character traits, or building a foundation that’s going to inform the child’s future decisions and actions. When you see an adult that can’t cope with life’s challenges or struggles, you can pretty strongly trace it back to a lack of a foundational instruction from their parents. Things that should have been given to them and instilled in them and childhood and that are necessary to deal successfully with the challenges of adulthood. One of the things we do is we teach our kids about money, right? I read a great article on from Dave Ramsey and I will link back to that in the show notes today. According to Dave Ramsey, preparing kids to grow into young adults means teaching them about work, something that translates into lessons on responsibility. Instilling money values also teaches kids about spending, which translates into learning to use wisdom. Remember we talk about that on the podcast all the time. Knowledge isn’t what we’re after. Wisdom is what we’re after. It’s one of the reasons I love that I’ve partnered with Evangelical Christian Credit Union. I’ve been talking about this quite a bit on the podcast lately. You can find out more about them in ECCU.com/Heidi but they’ve got great programs even for your little kids that will help you not only teach your kids the value of managing their money, but also see the reward of hard work. We don’t want to raise lazy kids. One of the most common threads that runs in all adults who struggle with one form of challenge or another in life is that they’re lazy. They’re too lazy to work, they’re too lazy to finish a chore that you’ve given them, lazy with their schoolwork.

Parents, I’m telling you what, show me an adult that can’t keep a job and I’ll show you somebody who got raised without the benefit of having their parents required hard work from them. Let me give you a pretty practical example. Last week I was having a little bit of an argument with one of our kids. I’d given them a job to do, a chore around the house, and we had exchanged a privilege for an extra dose of this particular chore. The first day they did it fine, second day they did it fine. Third Day the child was starting to get upset with me. Fourth day I noticed a straight up bad attitude. By the fifth day I was like— alright, deal’s off. I made a deal with you. You and I agreed together that this was this thing, this extra thing that you’re to earn, I gave you the means and the ability by which to do it. Now you’re telling me that you no longer want to hold up your end of the bargain. So if you can’t hold up your end of the bargain, the deal’s off. 

Oh boy, there was weeping and gnashing of teeth. I’ll tell you what, we came to an understanding and that understanding was— I am here to raise you into an independent teen who will become a responsible adult. In order to do that, I’m trying to equip you. One of the ways I’m equipping you is by requiring you to hold up your end of the bargain. Parents, when your kids don’t hold up their end of the bargain deals off. Deals over. You start that by training up your little kids. We started when they’re very little, we give them age appropriate chores when they’re three to four years old, remind them that they need to put the tops back on the containers that they open, that they need to flush the toilet, that they need to wipe the sinks down. I think it’s important for you to be talking to your kids about how to set the table when they’re really little. 

One of the things our kids have really loved to do over the years— I am a fan of eating dinner at home whenever we can. I love to set a beautiful table and candles and the whole nine yards. I’m the girl who used to put candles everywhere in the house. Mostly I use my diffusers around the house, but at dinner time I have candles everywhere, mostly little tea lights and I put them in containers around the house to make a beautiful table. I’ve taught my children how to do that over the years. If I put down the napkins when they’re little, then they put the forks on top and I let them follow me around the table and understand the lay of the table, and how we do it, and the concept of why I’m doing what I’m doing, and where does the water glass go, and all that.

Pretty soon, I’ve got a six or seven year old who I say— Hey, can you set the table? And my three year old who was following me around the table is now a six year old who can do it by themselves. When they’re four and five years old, you’re teaching them— hey, you guys can cut your food by yourself. Then we take it a step farther and we let them pour their drinks and things like that. Lots and lots of things that we can be doing for our children as they get older. I just want to encourage you to really praise your kids when you see that they’re following through on things that you’ve given them. If you want ideas for Chore Charts, you can find them on my website. I will link back to some fantastic ones in the show notes today.

I have written a book called tThe Busy Mom’s Guide to Daylight: How to fit your size 10 day into a size 10. It will encourage you. There are charts in there, there are ways for you to manage your day that will draw your children into the process with you. That brings me to the next point: include your children in the plans that you’re making. 

When you decide who’s doing what chores or who’s responsible, and for how long, usually I will give my kids about a four month window. When I had  seven kids at home—I’m down to three who I am actively parenting and training, and actually it’s gotten a little bit harder. With seven kids in the house, I felt like there was definitely more work to do but there’s also more of us to spread it out  among everyone. So things are a little bit different now. What I like to do is sit down with the kids and we talk about what needs to be done and we talk about the school schedules that are coming up. I have a 16 year old daughter at home who has a job and she works at my favorite consignment store and battleground—Kids Clothes. My daughter Summer is working there a couple of days a month. So on the weekends that we know she’s working, her responsibilities at the house changed a little bit, but they don’t go away. Maybe she trades with a sister, maybe we move that particular thing that she was going to do on Friday to Thursday or Monday, but we talk about it so that there is not only a clear game plan, but the expectation is clear. Can I just encourage you, mom and dad?— have the expectation be clear for your children.

We want our kids to complete the task and in order for them to do that, we they need to know what’s expected of them. When parents don’t actually ask their children to do much of anything or the expectations are not really clearly laid out, what happens is these kids don’t grow up with the sense of finishing what they start.I read an article in the New York Times and the author said: I asked 1050 parents and open ended question. What do you least like about parenting? The most common answer by far was discipline, which included enforcing chores and other responsibilities. Other answers were enforcing the rules, especially about household chores, the challenges of chores and disciplining a child and having to nag kids to do simple chores where.

Moment of silence. 

None of us likes to nag our kids about chores. It’s easier to do it ourselves and we may think our children should do chores, but we really don’t want to have to make them. When you fall down on the job right here, then you might as well not give the chore in the first place. The New York Times went on to say: yet when researchers asked parents about what qualities they care most about in fostering in their children, almost all of them would respond by saying they were deeply invested in raising, caring, ethical children. And most say they see these moral qualities like these as more important than academic or career achievements. I’ve said many times that you can raise a child that is knowledgeable, give your kid a ton of knowledge, but if you haven’t taught them wisdom, how to apply that knowledge with the heart of Jesus, then you’ve just got an arrogant kid walking around with no street knowledge.No real wisdom to back it up. Because all they’ve got is a puffed up head. 

I want to just encourage you —as you’re thinking about coming into the Christmas season, into Thanksgiving, into the fall when we settle into more of a routine. Come up with some sort of a plan for your house. Mom, you should not be wearing yourself out doing everything by yourself.  Take the time to teach your children to help you and I promise you it will come back and bless you. It really, really will. We can do better. Household chores might seem like small things, but I’m telling you what you guys, what you’re letting them do and what you’re requiring of them will come back to be a very big thing. It isn’t small at all.

Requiring your high school or to contribute to the family’s well being, and the smooth running of the household before he turns his attention to his homework conveys that you place a value his or her contribution. Sports, homework—these are not get out of chores free cards. The goal is, after all, is not to raise children that we can cuddle into the Ivy League. The goals to raise adults who can balance a caring role in their families and their communities with whatever lifetime achievement goals they choose. And chores are teaching your kids that balance. They’re not just chores, their life skills. There are some amazing articles. I will link back to them in the show notes today. Do your homework and then make a game plan. Get your kids involved in helping you around the house from toddlers all the way up to teenagers. I promise you, you will not be sorry that you did. 

Thank you Sarah for that question—it gave me a chance to talk about one of my favorite things which is get your kids off the bench and onto the battlefield of helping around the house. 

Thanks for listening everyone!

Write to Heidi:
Heidi St. John
c/o Firmly Planted Family
11100 NE 34th Cir, Vancouver, WA 98682

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