How to Get Kids to Do Chores: Does the Maya Method Work?

This isn’t Mayan “supermom” magic. Kids all over the world (including the US) do manual labor around the house/farm. Kids who don’t earn their keep are a relatively new invention.

(I’m probably the first child in my family line to not work growing up. Most Americans probably are not more than a generation or two removed from that.)

Except this concept appears to be about making chores fun for kids before they can even do those chores properly.

Which is clearly different than kids “earning their keep” which presumes they’re at an age that they can actually successfully and competently do those tasks.

I agree that children have historically put in a lot of work. The premise of the article is that the “Maya method” makes them more likely to volunteer to do so.

At least that’s what led the author to try to engage the toddler in chores.

But is it really critical to make chores feel fun for the kids?

By definition, chores are routine tasks, and it's natural for kids and adults to feel them as "not fun". I believe it's important to make kids realize that for the household to run successfully, we have to do them despite them being "not fun".

Having to do work that is not fun is an important life skill. Children should have lots of play time, but "work" needs to be understood. You do it even if you don't like it because nobody else will do it for you.

Or you can learn that "not fun" is usually not in the chore itself but in the attitude towards it.

> Except this concept appears to be about making chores fun for kids

Not really, you extrapolated that. It's about getting them to do chores early. But real ones, and giving them some leeway even if they are not 'really' providing value yet.

I have friends, who are adults, who have never cooked. If I put them in my kitchen tomorrow and expected them to feed themselves, they'd be eating burned cereal and cold beans.

Kids always have inherently less context in a situation. They'll get the context when you give it to them, but they just take a bit more time to ramp up. That doesn't mean you shouldn't teach them - since if you don't teach them now they won't magically know in a decade or two.

"Play" is the psychological/biological term for how children (of all species) learn important life skills by naturally finding them fun. Now that important life skills aren't obvious/instinctive because society is so complex, making those complex skills fun is the way to integrate them into the child's natural humanity. We don't need to make children miserable just for misery's sake out of some Puritanical ethic.

I mean, drudgery for the sake of it doesn't seem great either.

Nobody is saying to overload a child until they are unhappy. But the lesson needs to be learned that even if they don't naturally find it fun it still has to be done.