Do You Pay for Chores?

Have you seen "the box?"  Apparently if your kid leaves stuff lying around, you're supposed to take it and put it into "the box."  To get the item back, your child must pick a "chore card" from the deck located on the box's side.  This is a great way to teach kids that chores are punishment, and that they can't just have a messy day here and there.  It also sets up an adversarial relationship, if you don't have one already.  Eesh, who thinks of this stuff?

But then there's the flip side of that.  The lax parent who couldn't be bothered to correct her child or make him do anything that he doesn't wanna.  That includes saying please or thank you.  Why raise the child to be inauthentic and thank you if he isn't truly thankful, right? 

I think theory and "what you do when you're actually in the situation" are really two different things.  I won't even get into my fantasies of how nicely my children would actually behave before they were born.  Ha!  My uncle always said that when he had kids, he'd have a whistle.  When he blew it, all the children would line up by size, just as they did in the Sound of Music. He was a really funny guy, and could say it in such a way that you weren't quite sure whether he was serious.  I'm still not sure.  It didn't work out that way, obviously.

Guess what, though.  Chores have to be done!  It can't be all me, all day, doing absolutely everything.  I tell my children that the money they get for their chores is really just a tip.  No way anyone would clean three toilets for $2 in the real world.  But on the flip side of that, we do feed you every day, you know?  So there's that.