Your Kid Will Be Happy to Do Chores

Every child has a desire to impress their parents. I observe it with my son and I also see it with my friends and their children. My friends frequently seem to think that they need to be their childrens’ friends, instead of parents, and they believe that chores are a form of punishment. I’m not going to lie, I felt that way too towards my son until one day when he asked, “Dad, can I do some chores?”

It was like a smack across the face. “You want to do chores,” I asked. “Yes,” he replied, “I really want to help you with something inside of the house. I’m too little to help outside.” He was about 6 years old then. I said, “Absolutely, let’s do it.”

We started to shred paperwork. To this day, he loves to shred paperwork 😂. He’ll tell my wife, “okay mom, me and dad are going to go do some shredding.” It took her a few times to catch on that we were actually shredding paperwork instead of shredding on our guitars, which we do as well.

From that point on, I saw that even simple acts like that mean so much to a child. Shredding used to be one of my least favorite activities and now its my favorite since I get to spend it with my son, watching him smile and laugh as we’re doing it, and getting disappointed as we run out of old mail to shred.