Chores Are Not About Clean Floors
Parenting Series | Part 7 of 8
I wrote this especially for parents, but if you do not have children, or if your children are grown and no longer under your roof, there is still something here worth considering. Every home, workplace, church, and community has some version of the sticky spot on the stairs: a problem everybody notices, names, complains about, and steps around. This reflection is about chores, but it is also about responsibility, belonging, service, and the ordinary work of love. We can all grow in the habit of seeing what needs doing, taking responsibility for what is ours to do, and helping build the kind of home or community where people do not simply receive care, but learn to give it.
Most children do not naturally wake up in the morning and think, Today I would like to contribute meaningfully to the order and beauty of this household.
They do not usually gaze upon a full trash can and feel a stirring sense of civic duty. They do not see a pile of laundry and whisper, “At last, my moment has come.” They do not walk past crumbs, socks, cups, wrappers, backpacks, shoes, and the mysterious sticky spot on the counter with the moral clarity of a responsible adult.
They are children.
Which means they often see mess as scenery. They step over it, live beside it, and occasionally add to it with creative confidence.
Just recently, I was reminded of this on a Sunday morning before church. I am usually the first one ready, which sounds more virtuous than it is because I also know the safest place for a father of five on a Sunday morning is sometimes a chair in the living room. From there, I watched and listened as the rest of the house came alive: five children, ages nine to twenty-three, four girls and one boy, moving through various stages of preparation. Someone was looking for clothes. Someone needed undergarments. Someone could not find shoes. Someone needed the bathroom mirror. Someone needed access to a hairbrush, a toothbrush, the laundry room, all while I prayed for divine intervention.
At different points, they went up and down the stairs, checking the washer, checking the dryer, hunting for whatever essential article of clothing had not yet completed its journey from damp to wearable. And one by one, each of them announced that there was something wet, sticky, and slippery on the stairs. They did not use the same words, but they all delivered the report with the same urgent tone: there is a problem here, and this problem is clearly worth broadcasting.
What none of them did was stop and clean it up.
They simply reported it as they passed, as if our staircase had been equipped with a voice-activated maintenance system. Perhaps they imagined a small microphone hidden in the banister would send the alert to a satellite, which would then notify a vendor, who would dispatch a cleanup crew before the next child came down looking for a shoe. But no such crew arrived. The announcement was made. The problem remained.
That is the difference chores are meant to teach. A child has not fully learned responsibility when he can notice the mess, name the mess, complain about the mess, and step around the mess. Responsibility begins when he understands, I live here too. If I see something that needs doing, I can help do it.
Chores matter.
