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...

> 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

> 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 …