Make your teens help with chores

SCHOOLS ARE about to open, and many parents of teens are heaving a sigh of relief.

After-all, the fridge will be full again, and their energetic children will be under the firm hands of their school teachers.

Yet there is something every middle class parent can do for their teen during the holidays.

It is to give the house help or domestic manager a holiday.

“What?! Who will take care of the children and the house?” one may ask. How about the teens themselves?

Yes, you might not be able to recognise your house after a week or that the hard char-grilled elements on your plate are food, but things will progressively improve over time.

Think of it as education and life training.

After all, one day, not too long from now, those same children will get to live on their own and be unable to afford a domestic manager on their first salary.

Or they might have to travel to the West for further education where everyone is expected to cook and clean after themselves and domestic managers are a preserve of the rich.

But how did we get here? How is it that we, the middle class parents of today’s teens, hardly expect them to work in the home?

And when they do, why on earth would we give them pocket money as “pay”?

There is something to be said about teaching children how to earn money but surely they cannot be paid for making their beds!

To figure out where we lost the plot, let’s retrace our steps to earlier times.

The grandparents of today’s middle class teens generally grew up working the shamba, caring for cattle, cooking and performing other house chores as part of a day’s work while fitting in school.

When they became parents, they are the ones who loved to tell their children, “You know we used to walk 10 miles to school barefoot!”

Those children, the Uhuru generation, born between 1963 and 1980, the middle class parents of today’s teens grew up in urban and peri-urban areas, with no cows to graze and shambas to plough but were still expected to perform some basic house duties.

We were the someni vijana generation, whose parents in an effort to give us a “better” life and quality education, introduced the “house help”.

You see, our parents both likely worked full time away from the home, and needed some-one to take care of things.

When those parents took us, their city bred children upcountry, we thought it was “fun” and novel to milk the cow and weed the garden.

At the very least we would have an interesting story for our English composition.

Our upcountry cousins examined our soft and callous free palms and declared us spoilt and lazy.

We didn’t care, after-all, we lived in the big cities while they stayed in the rural areas performing what we thought was hard labour.

Our parents had begun to believe that the education they were so dearly paying for, was better than any life skills we could learn from the old way of life.

Some would even say, “My children need to spend their time studying, not doing menial housework.”

Eventually, the house-help who was meant to help, or in other words assist, took over most house keeping chores.

They “freed” us, only it was not mainly to study but play and watch television, which was now becoming a fixture in many urban homes.

Yet all was not lost, occasionally, parents would come to their senses, and give the house-help a holiday.

We would throw a small tantrum, although not very loudly as our parents had bought into the “spare the rod spoil the child” principle.

We run the risk of raising little kings without kingdoms, who expect everything at their beck and call.

One parent who sized up her teen said with a light touch, “The monster in my home is my creation!”

But all is not lost and it is never too late to teach children responsibility, independence or the value of work.

Start by giving the “housie” a break every holiday!

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