5 ms·

Maybe I’m being naive or self-centered, but why should kids have to do chores? It’s not like they have any choice in their existence. Unless it’s an agreement m

by mruts 8y ago

Maybe I’m being naive or self-centered, but why should kids have to do chores? It’s not like they have any choice in their existence. Unless it’s an agreement made by both parties, you probably shouldn’t make your kids to chores. My parents offered me a contract when I was young to do chores in exchange for money but I always refused because I didn’t want/need the money and really didn’t want to do chores. And I turned out just fine (relatively I guess).

maxxxxx 8y ago
My parents had 4 kids and didn't have much money. It simply would have been impossible without the kids helping. Chores weren't optional but sheer necessity.
sandworm101 8y ago
My chore was always to study. Doing well in school is more important than some list of daily assigned tasks. That said, I couldnt sit and watch tv while dad was cutting the lawn on a saturday morning.
Arainach 8y ago
Learning to do things that you don't want to but that have to get done is perhaps the most important life skill there is.
lgunsch 8y ago
Chores are a normal part of a functioning household, in the sense that if chores aren't done, or they are each done individually, then it isn't a household anymore. Each person could cook there own meal, and each person wash any dishes they want to use, but that wouldn't be very effective for anybody. Especially children, who can't do much for themselves.
adrusi 8y ago
This problem comes up in contractarian ethics: our laws are justified by a social contract between individuals and the state, but none of us actually signed the contract execept (liberally interpreted) for immigrants. Why should we accept being bound by these laws? Similarly to how an individual has no choice of being born into a society, a child has no choice of being born into a family. One common response to the problem in contractarian ethics is that we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.) That might be an unsatisfying response (we wouldn't accept that kind of reasoning in tort law) but we're going to need to have some kind of response or else we'll just be left with anarchy and everyone will be worse off. You can sheild your child from the fact that bring alive entails responsibilities outside yourself, but you'll inevitably be creating a leaky abstraction because reality just doesn't work that way.
- mmirate3 8y ago
  Actually, you've just outlined one of the good arguments against social contract theory.
  - adrusi 8y ago
    I don't know why you're getting down votes, because yes, I did. But my point isn't that contractarian ethics is how we should make decisions, it's that it's what's driving the grandparent's moral intuition — they even refer to a contract — and that what they're pointing out is actually a classic problem with that sort of ethical reasoning.
    - mmirate3 8y ago
      Apologies; I appear to have made my point in an overly indirect manner. Luckily your response here allows me to clarify myself concisely: Have you ever considered that that sort of ethical reasoning might in fact be pointing out a classic problem with society as we know it? (Insofar as, the legitimacy of today's centralized authorities rests upon social-contract theory, which as you have clearly shown, is baseless.)
- somebodythere 8y ago
  > anarchy and everyone will be worse off. Bold assertion.
- waterhouse 8y ago
  > we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.) However, if, say, I said, "I don't like the schools and I homeschool my kids, I think the military is 5x larger than it should be, I'm willing to pay for roads, I think drugs and prostitution should not be crimes and the police should be cut by 30%... and therefore my tax bill should be only x% of what it is", I don't actually have a choice in what "benefits" I "accept". (Suppose, for sake of argument, that I'd voted in every way I could for candidates who would change policies towards what I wanted, and it didn't work.) One response to that is "go live somewhere else", but (a) there may not be a somewhere else with a government that doesn't force people to pay for things I found objectionable, and (b) if I own my house and the land it's on, why should I have to move? There are people who will demand that you pay for certain services, and back this demand up with the threat of force, which will ultimately be enforced if needed. There's a little bit you can do to try to influence how it turns out, but for the average citizen, it's next to nothing. Some people are perfectly happy with every aspect of this. Others are less happy, but see no point in complaining. A few do complain, and the results they get probably inform the previous group's perception. > b[e]ing alive entails responsibilities outside yourself I don't like the use of the word "responsibility" here. The term "responsibility" implies, to me at least, that you're doing something wrong if you don't live up to your responsibility. If you agreed voluntarily to a contract or an informal promise, failing to fulfill it does seem wrong. Disliking the terms of an alleged "social contract" that other people unilaterally impose upon you and choosing to disobey them is risky, but it is not wrong. I guess there's one way in which it can be considered a contract. The true terms of the contract are, "Obey whatever rules we come up with (which change with every ballot measure and every legislature meeting) and we won't inflict our arbitrarily bad punishments upon you." But this would probably be considered under duress. Edit: Seems Lysander Spooner said the same stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Voluntarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Voluntarism And it says: "[in the 1600s] more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that certain features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us."
jlg23 8y ago
> Maybe I’m being naive or self-centered, but why should kids have to do chores? To learn the value of honest, dirty work. It is not about skill or intelligence, it is about sacrificing the one finite resource you cannot buy, for the sake of your community: time.
- mruts 8y ago
  I don’t want to know the value of dirty work. If I had to milk the cows and do a bunch of work everyday that would directly cut into the time in which I was actually doing something valuable: programming. Time is scarce and you need to be laser focused on how you spend it. Doing chores is a terrible time investment. You’re wasting your most valuable years.
DanBC 8y ago
Children should do chores so they don't grow into helpless clueless adults.
matwood 8y ago
My parents viewed chores as part of living in the household. I asked for an allowance once and my dad said the food that showed up in the pantry every week was my allowance. My dad also used chores as a way to build discipline, and teach lessons. I remember washing the cars one time and doing a really crappy job. He made me completely wash them again. Do something right the first time. Helping him with his side jobs like cutting firewood or picking oysters showed me what physically hard work looked like. It also showed me how to do things I don't want to do, but that need to get done. This came in handy while studying in college, and is a lesson that has helped whatever success I have ever had. Chores are one way to teach kids how to be successful when they become adults.
titusjohnson 8y ago
Flip it around. Under what circumstances would you allow another person to freeload off of you for 18 years? Take up space in your house, eat your food, require you to drive them around, need money for their activities and fun time, use your TV, dirty up the house but not clean it, never cook a dinner or wash a dish, and in general have a good old time until they decide to move out. "I didn't have a choice in being here" as a response to "Do your Chores" makes it sound like the parents went off into some land of nirvana and kidnapped a blissful native for the sole purpose of enslaving them to their will. Having children is how our species procreates. It's the only option if we want to continue as a species. Requiring that everyone living together pitch in and do a little bit of work to keep the household running smoothly is far, far from an onerous requirement.

by mruts 8y ago

maxxxxx 8y ago

My parents had 4 kids and didn't have much money. It simply would have been impossible without the kids helping. Chores weren't optional but sheer necessity.

sandworm101 8y ago

My chore was always to study. Doing well in school is more important than some list of daily assigned tasks. That said, I couldnt sit and watch tv while dad was cutting the lawn on a saturday morning.

Arainach 8y ago

Learning to do things that you don't want to but that have to get done is perhaps the most important life skill there is.

lgunsch 8y ago

Chores are a normal part of a functioning household, in the sense that if chores aren't done, or they are each done individually, then it isn't a household anymore. Each person could cook there own meal, and each person wash any dishes they want to use, but that wouldn't be very effective for anybody. Especially children, who can't do much for themselves.

adrusi 8y ago

This problem comes up in contractarian ethics: our laws are justified by a social contract between individuals and the state, but none of us actually signed the contract execept (liberally interpreted) for immigrants. Why should we accept being bound by these laws? Similarly to how an individual has no choice of being born into a society, a child has no choice of being born into a family. One common response to the problem in contractarian ethics is that we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.) That might be an unsatisfying response (we wouldn't accept that kind of reasoning in tort law) but we're going to need to have some kind of response or else we'll just be left with anarchy and everyone will be worse off. You can sheild your child from the fact that bring alive entails responsibilities outside yourself, but you'll inevitably be creating a leaky abstraction because reality just doesn't work that way.

mmirate3 8y ago
Actually, you've just outlined one of the good arguments against social contract theory.
- adrusi 8y ago
  I don't know why you're getting down votes, because yes, I did. But my point isn't that contractarian ethics is how we should make decisions, it's that it's what's driving the grandparent's moral intuition — they even refer to a contract — and that what they're pointing out is actually a classic problem with that sort of ethical reasoning.
  - mmirate3 8y ago
    Apologies; I appear to have made my point in an overly indirect manner. Luckily your response here allows me to clarify myself concisely: Have you ever considered that that sort of ethical reasoning might in fact be pointing out a classic problem with society as we know it? (Insofar as, the legitimacy of today's centralized authorities rests upon social-contract theory, which as you have clearly shown, is baseless.)
somebodythere 8y ago
> anarchy and everyone will be worse off. Bold assertion.
waterhouse 8y ago
> we implicitly sign the social contract by accepting it's benefits. We benefit from not living amidst anarchic chaos, and we benefit from the services provided by the state (roads, schools, etc.) However, if, say, I said, "I don't like the schools and I homeschool my kids, I think the military is 5x larger than it should be, I'm willing to pay for roads, I think drugs and prostitution should not be crimes and the police should be cut by 30%... and therefore my tax bill should be only x% of what it is", I don't actually have a choice in what "benefits" I "accept". (Suppose, for sake of argument, that I'd voted in every way I could for candidates who would change policies towards what I wanted, and it didn't work.) One response to that is "go live somewhere else", but (a) there may not be a somewhere else with a government that doesn't force people to pay for things I found objectionable, and (b) if I own my house and the land it's on, why should I have to move? There are people who will demand that you pay for certain services, and back this demand up with the threat of force, which will ultimately be enforced if needed. There's a little bit you can do to try to influence how it turns out, but for the average citizen, it's next to nothing. Some people are perfectly happy with every aspect of this. Others are less happy, but see no point in complaining. A few do complain, and the results they get probably inform the previous group's perception. > b[e]ing alive entails responsibilities outside yourself I don't like the use of the word "responsibility" here. The term "responsibility" implies, to me at least, that you're doing something wrong if you don't live up to your responsibility. If you agreed voluntarily to a contract or an informal promise, failing to fulfill it does seem wrong. Disliking the terms of an alleged "social contract" that other people unilaterally impose upon you and choosing to disobey them is risky, but it is not wrong. I guess there's one way in which it can be considered a contract. The true terms of the contract are, "Obey whatever rules we come up with (which change with every ballot measure and every legislature meeting) and we won't inflict our arbitrarily bad punishments upon you." But this would probably be considered under duress. Edit: Seems Lysander Spooner said the same stuff. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Voluntarism https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Social_contract#Voluntarism And it says: "[in the 1600s] more importance was attached to consideration, meaning a mutual exchange of benefits necessary to the formation of a valid contract, and most contracts had implicit terms that arose from the nature of the contractual relationship rather than from the choices made by the parties. Accordingly, it has been argued that social contract theory is more consistent with the contract law of the time of Hobbes and Locke than with the contract law of our time, and that certain features in the social contract which seem anomalous to us, such as the belief that we are bound by a contract formulated by our distant ancestors, would not have seemed as strange to Hobbes' contemporaries as they do to us."

jlg23 8y ago

> Maybe I’m being naive or self-centered, but why should kids have to do chores? To learn the value of honest, dirty work. It is not about skill or intelligence, it is about sacrificing the one finite resource you cannot buy, for the sake of your community: time.

mruts 8y ago
I don’t want to know the value of dirty work. If I had to milk the cows and do a bunch of work everyday that would directly cut into the time in which I was actually doing something valuable: programming. Time is scarce and you need to be laser focused on how you spend it. Doing chores is a terrible time investment. You’re wasting your most valuable years.

DanBC 8y ago

Children should do chores so they don't grow into helpless clueless adults.

matwood 8y ago

My parents viewed chores as part of living in the household. I asked for an allowance once and my dad said the food that showed up in the pantry every week was my allowance. My dad also used chores as a way to build discipline, and teach lessons. I remember washing the cars one time and doing a really crappy job. He made me completely wash them again. Do something right the first time. Helping him with his side jobs like cutting firewood or picking oysters showed me what physically hard work looked like. It also showed me how to do things I don't want to do, but that need to get done. This came in handy while studying in college, and is a lesson that has helped whatever success I have ever had. Chores are one way to teach kids how to be successful when they become adults.

titusjohnson 8y ago

Flip it around. Under what circumstances would you allow another person to freeload off of you for 18 years? Take up space in your house, eat your food, require you to drive them around, need money for their activities and fun time, use your TV, dirty up the house but not clean it, never cook a dinner or wash a dish, and in general have a good old time until they decide to move out. "I didn't have a choice in being here" as a response to "Do your Chores" makes it sound like the parents went off into some land of nirvana and kidnapped a blissful native for the sole purpose of enslaving them to their will. Having children is how our species procreates. It's the only option if we want to continue as a species. Requiring that everyone living together pitch in and do a little bit of work to keep the household running smoothly is far, far from an onerous requirement.