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.To be sure, a few exhortations about the workethic and character development could accompany the recommenda-tion that parents help ready children for chores, but the brighter imagesof the earlier 20th century, of self-reliant children and cohesive families,were harder to come by.Second, all the manuals noted the need for parents to expect peri-odic declines in children s performance.Children who did a chore wellfor a while might slack off.The freshness of a new assignment could notbe sustained.Children might grow accustomed to praise and lose theirmotivation.And all this might occur well before the further woes ofadolescence, with the distraction of peers and leisure, more schoolwork, and new kinds of sleep demands.Small wonder that a few writers, by the 1990s, urged that the wholemess be bypassed by eliminating chore expectations of any sort.Thus,the novelist Jane Smiley, in a Harper s magazine article, in 1995, dis-puted the whole assumption of chores, while bragging that her  daugh-ters have led a life of almost tropical idleness, much to their benefit.Her reasoning was that chores did not in fact develop work habits butrather taught children alienation, in that they always got the least ap-pealing jobs and never learned that work that one wanted to do is notreally labor at all. It s good for a teenager to suddenly decide that the148 ANXIOUS PARENTSbathtub is so disgusting she d better clean it herself.I admit that for theparent, this can involve years of waiting.But if she doesn t want to wait,she can always spend her time dusting.  Good work is not the workwe assign children, but the work they want to do, whether it s readingin bed.or cleaning their rooms or practicing the flute. This was amaverick view, of course Smiley noted that most of her Midwesternneighbors continued to believe in some of the older merits of chores inteaching work, or at least responsibility, and family togetherness.But itdid cap a long period in which writing about chores tended to lose sightof the larger subject of chores function in favor of ad hoc exploration oftactics in an area rife with problems and disputes.28For, clearly, what had begun, in the first third of the century, as anopportunity to maintain children s commitment to work in an age ofdisappearing formal employment had degenerated into a drive to in-still a resigned routine.Chores remained on the agenda, but their rangehad diminished, and their purpose had become more symbolic thanreal.Experts still encouraged certain expectations in this area, whilealso recognizing that parents maintained some expectations on theirown that required strategic guidance.But chores had not helped keepthe beacon of work alive, as some of advocates had hoped.And theyoften served more to challenge family cohesion than to support it.Mostof the expert admonitions and case studies came to revolve not aroundsocialization so much as around an effort to reconcile a residualparental commitment to chores with the task of maintaining some sem-blance of family harmony.Yet, the enthusiasm for chores did not die out, as witness the con-tinued popularity of Dr.Spock s manual.In the mid-1990s, the Ameri-can Academy of Pediatrics praised chores as  an essential part of learn-ing that life requires work, not just play. And Anthony Wolf s bril-liantly titled manual Get Out of My Life, But First Could You Drive Me andCheryl to the Mall urged the assigning of chores, especially on weekends,even at the cost of a bit of adolescent sleep.Advice givers had dividedon their recommended approaches, and defenders of chores unques-tionably were under attack, but a real commitment to the value ofchores did not yield entirely to a concern for tactics.29WORK AND CHORES 149BENEATH THE SURFACE: SOME CHANGE FACTORSWhy and how did the context for chores change during the 20th cen-tury? The child-rearing literature suggests not only key patterns ofchange, and the confusions attached, but also some of the causes.The same concerns about children s vulnerability that led to attackson formal child labor could also apply to uncertainties about chores onthe part of experts and parents alike.There was a consistent fear ofoverburdening children with physical tasks and responsibility beyondtheir capacity.Parents, particularly, also cited anxieties about the po-tential for accidents.Growing numbers of chores around the house andyard involved machinery, and the dangers could be quite real.Manyparents preferred to assume the risks themselves or to pass them on toadult employees such as a lawn service rather than to expose theirchildren.Germ anxiety might affect other chore assignments, such asbathroom cleaning.Concerns about children s sleep clearly affectedparents willingness to wake their darlings to get some houseworkdone.Finally, some parents, even loving ones, might question their chil-dren s competence, as confidence in children in some ways diminished.One mother, in the 1920s, cited her daughter s  awkwardness and un-reliability as the reason she did not entrust her with housework, fos-tering what could obviously turn out to be a vicious circle.The fact wasthat it was no longer essential, in most urban homes, for kids to do do-mestic chores, and some parents opted out.30Just as in the workplace, the range of potential jobs in the homeshrank, whether for good or ill.Reduced birthrates and the practice ofhaving children closer together cut the possibility of using children tocare for siblings.Ongoing urbanization reduced the availability of farmchores [ Pobierz całość w formacie PDF ]