I hated ironing. I still do. Perhaps because growing up my father was a Real Estate Agent. He dressed up everyday. White shirt and tie. Also being that he was OCD it meant that he didn't just have 9-10 dress shirts, he had 100's. Literally.
As punishment for goodness knows what because I rarely got in any trouble (insert hysterical laughter here) my mother, who must also hate ironing, would send me to the basement to iron. Our basement was a dungeon. It was not finished like other families I knew. It was concrete and storage and a hole in the ground where the bathroom should have been. It had those small slits that were suppose to be windows, 6 ft off the ground. Great during a tornado but when the house fell in around you - how the hell were you suppose to get out! It's not like we could live down there for days there wasn't any food or water - well except for the hole in the ground where the toilet was suppose to be.
Ironing in the dungeon was like that scene out of Johnny Dangerously. (If you have no idea what this means, go to Netflix and watch it, the movie is hysterical.) There were not a few white shirts, there were huge, over sized laundry baskets overflowing with white shirts. Had they been any other color it would have looked like the prison laundry room. Unpainted concrete block walls, overflowing laundry bins everywhere, enough dirty underwear to bury you alive and that was just Dad's. Don't get me started on what laundry for five kids looks like. Oy vey!
Why then do I make my children do chores? Because spending that much time in the dungeon ironing taught me a valuable lesson - what doesn't kill you makes you strong enough to win an arm wrestling contest against your eight grade teacher. That's a story for another time.....thank you to Curious.com
Give the gift of chores
Take out the trash! With so much pressure for children to build their resumes and get into good colleges, household chores are a thing of the past. In a recent survey of 1,000 U.S. adults, 82% reported having to perform household chores as a kid. But only 28% say they require chores of their own children! Other priorities--like learning new languages, playing varsity sports, and joining clubs--have take precedent. Many parents apparently view time spent on chores as wasted. This is ironic since, according to decades of research, chores are actually a proven indicator of success--emotionally, academically, and professionally. One study followed a group of children through their 20s, and found chore-performing kids to have good relationships, be self sufficient, and achieve early career success. In other words, parents who do everything for their children are actually doing less for them. Hey kids, where is my newspaper!?
Learn more about this Curio:
The Wall Street Journal: "Why Children Need Chores"
The Australian Business Review: "Children need chores to teach mastery, responsibility""
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