Life is too short to scrub grout.
Me, you, and Cool Hand Luke.
I’m in great company.
The chores themselves aren’t always the punishment. My daughters have been on a streak of getting themselves grounded for various reasons lately and I am happy to do it. That means no TV, electronic devices like iPads (that is the real punishment) and the only things they can do have to be productive like reading nonfiction or working on something beneficial. Something like cleaning leaves off the patio during a nice day is one of their better options. I won’t let them just lay in bed and mope all day. They pick the chores they want to do off of a list that I make.
Punishment brings excellent results, as long as the only result you want is for them to find new and better ways of not getting caught next time.
If punishment really did what you think it’s supposed to do, then adjusting the form and style of punishment would be beneficial. But it doesn’t do that. Punishment fails every time - it’s not your fault that you can’t get it to work.
So… the only question is what to replace it with. Reward? Nope - same problem in reverse - what they’re “supposed to do” is completely ignored, and they instead (yes, instead, not additionally) look for ways to game the system to maximize their rewards.
Eh, at some point they’re going to have to sit in a chair quietly for some length of time, but we still do time-outs.
That’s fine. I disagree with the whole “Oh, don’t punish them with work because then they won’t like work” idea. If your dishes are filthy and you live in a rat’s nest, it’s not because mommy and daddy were too mean and made you wash dishes, it’s because you’re lazy. Stop trying to blame your laziness on others and take some responsibility for being an adult and living an adult life.
Not if your children have some intelligence, a sense of good/bad and right/wrong and the understanding that you love them.
Too late to edit:
I’ll note now that this is in the context of “doing dishes as punishment makes you hate dishes, oh no!” and not “You have to work three jobs” or “You’re clinically depressed and spend days in bed”.
It sounds as though you have some valid issues regarding trust to work through but that doesn’t really relate to the idea of doing housework as a legitimate punishment for things legitimately done wrong.
No, you hate cleaning for the same reason that almost everyone hates cleaning. It’s a boring, futile, Sisyphean task. That’s one of the things that makes it a good punishment. No one wants to do it, and since it takes little mental power, you can spend all that time doing it stewing over how much you dislike it.
You can’t ever finish it. You always have to do it again. It’s not interesting. Horrible.
Here’s a great TED talk by Dan Ariely, about what makes us feel good about work.
Around 3 min in he starts talking about an experiment where he gave people a lego set and paid them to put it together, with decreasing amounts each time, to see how long they’d be interested in the work of putting together lego sets as the payment amount decreased.
The variation is that for some subjects, after they put the legos together, they take the finished thing and put it elsewhere (but told the subject that they would take it apart later to be used by other experimental subjects), and for others, they took it apart right in front of them as they were building the next one, then if they build another, it was back to the first one.
People are way less interested in the second version, and stop building much sooner, even though they know that their legos are going to be taken apart and the monetary reward is the same in both cases.
I never used chores as punishment. Mainly because it meant I was punished too. Watching over a petulant child do a chore was always painful to me. Taking away a fun thing was more effective.
Isn’t the purpose of punishment to reinforce the lesson so the kid doesn’t do it again? Grounding a kid and taking away electronics were the punishments I meted out, but if “grounding” means lying around watching TV or gaming, it’s not much of a reinforcement. So I tended to make them help me stain the porch or sweep out the garage. Working together meant we could talk things over, and kids tend to open up more when doing something than when just sitting.
My kids have chores they have to do, regardless. They get part of their allowance for doing some, some are just a social duty. I would never tack on more chores as punishment, though, I think that sends the wrong message about what work should be.
If I really need to punish them, I change the WiFi password…
That is bullshit. Punishment works just great in many circumstances even for adults. That is why it a tried and true approach from everywhere from schools to the military.
My oldest daughter wasn’t living up to her potential as a high school student recently so I just started pulling privileges including electronic devices until she did better. Guess what, her grades skyrocketed when I caused enough misery to make her actually try. It wasn’t like I beat her or locked her in a dungeon but she knew I would keep going until she didn’t have access to anything she cares about. There is no way that she wouldn’t get caught either. Her progress is tracked online and through teacher’s reports and I make her look at them closely with me before I decide what to do. It isn’t an ability problem. She is just lazy as hell and the right kinds of punishment works like a charm. If she does well enough, she even gets an occasional reward.
I think it depends on the offense and the “chore”. My kids usually get penalized with less time with electronics. They can earn some electronics back, however, by doing extra chores.
I will tell a story from a old friend of mine. Back in high school, he was getting friendly with a girl, while driving. His shirt wasn’t on. A policeman came up behind them, and he decided that it would be a good idea to put his shirt back on. While driving. Which is when he ran through the red light, in front of the policeman. His dad was NOT happy. My friend spent his summer vacation re-roofing their house. I believe that punishment made quite an impression.
Chores weren’t used as punishment in my family. They’re just tasks we expect the kids to do.
Restricting tv or grounding was the favored punishment. Allowance might be lost for really bad behavior.
Siblings, of course, learn the lesson that being good is a great way to make someone else do all the work.
I think that when you wrong someone, a sacrifice on your part is appropriate for making things right. If, for example, I’m late to work because my daughter got mad at me and slow-walked to the car, she’s made things worse for me. I might ask her to make things better for me that evening, by taking over some small chore: maybe she’ll sweep the kitchen floor, which is normally part of my evening chores.
Once she does that, things are right between us.
I prefer this sort of consequence for crappy behavior over things like removing screen time: it gives the kid a chance to connect their ill behavior to the harm it causes, and to figure out what they can do to ameliorate that harm.
My Daddy always made us do yard work or garden work for punishment. We hated it with a purple passion. I now enjoy yard work. We grow a huge garden every year. When I am sweating and huffing and puffing outside I think of my Daddy. Semi pleasantly. Maybe.
I think hating chores, or at least disliking them, is pretty normal. The only thing my parents punished us for with chores was expressing boredom, and I don’t think either of us grew up liking chores more than people whose every misdeed was punished with them.
Don’t know if it was good parenting or bad but for me growing up chores were chores and punishment was punishment. If the punishment was physical labor it was so widely varied that it never put me off one particular thing. One time it may be cleaning the car, next time clearing all the weeds Dad didn’t have the time to handle, another putting the garage in order. Most often it was a quick swat or grounding but labor was not off the table.