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

The problem is that most parents don't want to (or can't) invest the time and effort into teaching their kids how to do household tasks.

When your children are young it's easier to just to tasks yourself than to try and get your children to do it, they'll break things and make mistakes in the course of learning.

But that's how you learn. I had to cook dinner once a week from the age of around 12. Sure my parents had a few shit dinners when I started out and sometimes I made a massive mess (or set things on fire!), but I learned how to cook and bake. Same goes for any other household tasks.

Of course, the other secret to the Maya Method is La Chancla: https://www.npr.org/sections/codeswitch/2014/11/04/361205792...

It's totally possible to learn to cook without ever ruining a meal. You start by working under supervision and doing prep tasks - a lot like the hierarchy in a professional kitchen.

My daughter is three and she already cracks the eggs for breakfast. We’ve ended up with a few yolks on the countertop but it works pretty well. Today I took out the garbage and came back to discover she’d put a new bag in, without any prompting whatsoever. She desperately -wants- to be useful and get our approval, and it’s really endearing. It makes me really proud of my little child, even if the day before she pulled all the stuffing out of the pillow.

It believe it also helps that we don’t have TV or any electronic devices for her to use. We dabbled in Daniel Tiger and the like, and her behavior immediately became worse, and the TV was the only way to mollify her.

> When your children are young it's easier to just to tasks yourself than to try and get your children to do it, they'll break things and make mistakes in the course of learning.

Is it? N=1, but almost since my toddler could walk we always cleaned up after breakfast together. She vacuums any food crumbs off the floor and table while I do the dishes. Sometimes she also helps out drying the dishes. I am happy that I and her mother taught her that because it is really also easier for me. She really feels useful when participating, and takes constructive criticism of necessary.

This opposed to the kids of a colleague of mine which won't lift a finger and rather couch potato with a iPad or iPhone.

You can start way before 12 with cooking. My son made scrambled eggs a day before his third birthday. (I just put the stuff out and told him what to do -- he put the butter in the pan, turned the stove on, cracked and scrambled the egg, and poured it into the pan. The only thing he struggled with was getting the egg out of the pan fast enough that it wouldn't burn, so I helped with that.)

In the kitchen he can peel garlic, fill ice trays, make bread dough into rolls ... and again, he's just turned three. He's much slower with all of those things than I am, but if I time things right, he's actually a (small) net positive. For example, he'll make one roll, and I'll make the other 7, or I'll give him 4 cloves of garlic 10 minutes before I need them.

My parents were never adventurous cooks (ironic, considering they love travelling to other countries for their cuisine), but I've always loved pushing culinary boundaries. A standard dinner cooked by my mum might consist of rice, microwaved vegetables, and microwaved chicken breast with a jar or packet of sauce mix. Most meals my parents cooked were based around pre-made sauces or seasoning packets.

I think the ruined meals were more a case of me biting off more than I could chew and attempting something beyond my skill level. I've always loved experimenting in the kitchen, but when I was starting out it didn't always go so well.

My experimenting has paid dividends though, as people are constantly impressed at everything I cook.

It's a good point that it takes effort for the parent to break the tasks down into small learnable steps.

The very early cooking memory for me is making mince pies. I'd cut out the shaped tops (a variety of christmas trees, stars, bells etc) whilst mum did the bases and filled them and I'd put the covers on and glaze them. Slightly later I'd get to roll the pastry as well.

Much like making our own pizzas (putting the toppings on) - you had entertained children whilst also being productive. I wouldn't have described this as "chores" though. (they came later)

> The problem is that most parents don't want to (or can't) invest the time and effort into teaching their kids how to do household tasks.

The problem with that is that teaching kids how to do human tasks is basically the definition of parenting. You're correct that many parents don't parent — but that's a problem which needs to be solved.

40% of people don't even cook or eat together. We go out as a family or order in like 2 times a month. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/wonk/wp/2015/03/05/the-s...

Phones and technology also get in our way and we as a society have become passive in parenting. The pay back when they are pre-teens is going to be painful. http://www.apa.org/monitor/2016/02/smartphone.aspx

We started using Blue Apron a couple of times a week and an unexpected benefit was that my kids have started cooking and helping in meal prep more. Having the correct ingredients in the needed portion size with clear text and lots of images makes cooking very kid friendly.

My wife makes cooking videos with my three-year-old. https://www.youtube.com/channel/UC_suiznE4hpPUaR0UJci6eA

I'm not a parent, but if life has taught me anything is that time invested now is time saved in the future. Also, it's not only children who mess up a learning process. Anyone who's learning will make mistakes and probably break things. I'll never forget when my brother, being in his late teens, broke the food processor trying to prepare macaroni.

Nicely done.

My son's first cooking task was washing the vegetables.

Side benefit is he'd eat anything he had helped cook. He didn't like mushrooms. But he ate them without me asking.

> The pay back when they are pre-teens is going to be painful.

And when they’re teens, and young adults, and older adults too. I think that misparenting & malparenting (and miseducation & maleducation) are to blame for a lot of our modern problems, e.g. school shootings (something which, so far as I can tell, essentially didn’t exist until the 90s, despite weapons being a huge part of American culture for over 200 years).

I don’t believe we should ignore technology, and indeed it offers a lot for parenting (e.g. phones could enable parents to allow their children more freedom, rather than being used to grant them less). But as a society we’ve not figured out how to use it wisely yet.

I also think that we’ve deliberately ignored the lessons of the past and of other cultures, but that quickly becomes an entirely different discussion …

How does that happen?

> And when they’re teens, and young adults, and older adults too. I think that misparenting & malparenting (and miseducation & maleducation) are to blame for a lot of our modern problems, e.g. school shootings (something which, so far as I can tell, essentially didn’t exist until the 90s, despite weapons being a huge part of American culture for over 200 years).

Columbine?

Bombings and shootings have existed for decades. Its an urban legend that they are a modern thing.

Semi-automatic rifles didn't exist in 1850.

We had school lynchings, though.

https://www.haaretz.com/us-news/.premium.MAGAZINE-how-racial...

Happened in 1999

I'd be very careful with kids under 4 because they don't have all their reflexes yet. I know it sounds weird, but that reflex where your arm pulls itself back from something hot doesn't exist at that age. Little kids make up a huge proportion of burn victims for that reason. 5+ should be OK though.

...Right, making it the most famous school shooting of the 1990s. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

We also had school shootings. They just weren't as deadly. There were 3 deaths. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

The first was in Chancellorsville, VA in 1840.

The Urban legend is not that it is a modern thing but it is the frequency. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_school_shootings_in_th...

Please don't bring generational and political flamebait into HN threads.

https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html

In the 1950's, anarchist(?) bombings were epidemic I understand.

Also at the turn of the century (19th to 20th), famously giving the pretext for WW1.

Man, I really want to know, too!