If you have difficulties getting your children to do their household chores, showing them the results of this new scientific study might help. After all, there’s really no escaping house chores and aside from helpful tools and automated machines, they still need to be done. It’s already pretty difficult to find the determination to do chores as an adult, let alone when you’re a child.

As a kid, chores are never fun to do, and they seem like a major hassle; all to just please your parents.

However, it now turns out that doing those chores as a child actually has an effect on one’s later life as an adult.

Doing chores builds character, or at least, that’s what a recent study from the University of Minnesota says. Professor Marty Rossman, who specializes in family education, spent a lot of time researching if doing chores a child had any noticeable effects when they’re an adult.

The research paper, “Involving Children In Household Tasks: Is It Worth The Effort?”, states that there’s a positive correlation.

In short, if you get your children involved in doing household tasks, parents essentially teach responsibility in practice.

Aside from responsibility, doing the chores has other benefits as well: a higher competence, more self-reliance and a higher value of their self-worth. All of these positive impacts stay with someone for the rest of their lives, all by doing household chores as a task. If you think about it, it does make quite some sense, but this research is the scientific confirmation (and perhaps justification) we all needed as parents.

Plenty of independent experts definitely agree with the study, including Julie Lythcott-Haims who wrote the critically acclaimed book “How to Raise an Adult”. The parenting expert says that unlike academic performance, love and chores are the things that define children the most.

“Our kids need us to be a little less obsessed with grades and scores and a whole lot more interested in childhood providing a foundation for their success built on things like love and chores,” she writes.

So what’s the best age to start with house chores?

The short answer is that you should start assigning chores as soon as possible – but only if your children actually understand what they need to do and can actually do it. Lythcott-Haims calls it a “roll up your sleeves and pitch in mindset”.

“A mindset that says, there’s some unpleasant work, someone’s got to do it, it might as well be me, a mindset that says, I will contribute my effort to the betterment of the whole, that that’s what gets you ahead in the workplace. Now, we all know this. You know this.”

There was one other major element in the study, that doesn’t really have to do anything with household chores, but something much more important: love.

Happiness truly comes from love.

“Not love of work, love of humans: our spouse, our partner, our friends, our family,” she said.

The main takeaway of this study and the findings from Lythcott-Haims is pretty clear: household chores have a positive effect later in life, it’s best to start giving them as soon as possible but most importantly, love equals happiness.

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Source: Involving Children In Household Tasks: Is It Worth The Effort?, My Positive Outlooks