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...

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.