Our advice columnists have heard it all over the years—so today we’re diving into the archives of Care and Feeding to share classic parenting letters with our readers. Have a question for Care and Feeding? Submit it here.

Dear Care and Feeding,

My wife is a surgeon, and I work full-time outside the home (we’re both women). Though we could financially make it work if I wanted to stay home full-time, I really enjoy my work, and we both thought it was important our three children see both moms as working adults. This arrangement only works because we outsource a lot of the domestic work around the house—laundry, cleaning, yardwork, etc.—to external folks. We do this so we can spend the little time we all have together bonding and having quality time, as opposed to doing domestic work. But there’s been an unintended consequence.

Here’s the issue: My oldest son “Paul” (he’s 12) has seen this arrangement his entire life, and believes it’s completely normal for a maid to take care of all the housework. We messed up in not expecting him to make his bed or tidy his room—we never really taught those skills, and haven’t held him accountable. Most of his friends are far more adept at housework. I don’t want him to grow up expecting someone else to do all the “dirty work” for him, be it a maid or his future spouse. At the same time, my wife and I are dreading the thought of spending limited family time on dragging a 12-year-old through chores. He’s a good kid, but of course balks whenever we ask him to do work that we’ve never expected or asked of him before. Have we permanently created a non-self-sufficient kid? Is there a (relatively) painless way for us to turn this around?

—Moms in Massachusetts

Dear Moms,

I don’t think this need be permanent, and it’s really good that you’ve now realized it’s an issue, because you have time to course-correct. You are going to have to give Paul chores and then deal with whatever his reaction is, but such is life and parenting! That doesn’t mean you need to “drag” him through endless hours of housework—as in most cases, there is middle ground. Just pick one or two basic cleaning skills to focus on at a time, and build on that.

I’d probably start with having him make his bed and keep his room picked up, because it’s his space and it makes sense for him to learn to be responsible for it. When we’ve periodically hired cleaners to come in and help or do a deep clean, we have always kept to the rule that all the rooms need to be picked up before the housecleaners come in to dust and vacuum—it is not their job to pick our stuff up off the floor. Then continue by choosing one skill at a time to teach: setting the table. Loading and unloading the dishwasher. Vacuuming the rugs. Dusting a room. Doing a load of laundry. Cleaning the bathroom. Learning to cook a simple meal. Mowing the lawn or raking leaves, if applicable. Etc. You want him to learn all of it eventually, but of course he can’t be expected to learn everything at once.

Obviously, you’re not going to make all of these tasks Paul’s responsibility; he should have a few chores at a time (for example: keeping his room reasonably picked up, doing his laundry weekly or biweekly, and loading the dishwasher after dinner). You can switch these out for other skills once he’s acquired more. And there’s no need to single him out—now that you’ve noticed this pattern with him, you can work on not perpetuating it with your other kids. Start teaching your two younger ones household chores as soon as they’re capable of learning, and give all your kids regular responsibilities based on what feels reasonable to you.

I think you can be clear with your children about why they need to have these practical life skills: It’s for their own good! Unless you are planning on paying for their future service professionals, they probably will need to do all these things for themselves one day. As you said, you don’t want them expecting other people, in particular future roommates or partners, to clean up their messes and do all the domestic labor unaided. Additionally, I think it’s OK to help them understand how fortunate they are, and that most people can’t afford domestic help at all (personally, I know my children love it when I remind them that I had to wash all the family dishes without a dishwasher). You don’t need to try to make them feel guilty, of course, but a little reality/privilege check might help counter whatever unexamined feelings of entitlement have built up over the years.

—Nicole Chung

From: We’ve Never Asked Our Tween to Do Chores. Is It Too Late to Start? (July 7th, 2021.)

Dear Care and Feeding,

In March I got married for the first time and became a stepmom to a 13-year-old boy and a 10-year-old girl. I do not have any children of my own, but these kids are mine now. My challenge is with the 13-year-old. He is age-appropriate in every way—all he wants to do is sleep and play video games. I worry about how much is too much. My husband and I were going to impose some pretty strict digital media rules, but my sister, who has raised three very good boys, talked me out of them, because playing games and sleeping in is normal for a boy his age. So I have decided that during school, as long as his homework is done and he goes to bed on time, there are no restrictions. (We do make him do one “active” thing after school each week: tennis or baseball depending on the season, which he hates but he does it.) On weekends I let him play and sleep pretty much as he wants to, unless we have a family activity the next day—then the gaming needs to go off by 11:15 p.m. My worry is about the long breaks and summer. I don’t think it is healthy for him to stay up till 4 in the morning playing games and then sleeping until 4 in the afternoon.

But 13 is hard. He is not a kid anymore, but he isn’t old enough to work. He is not motivated by money, so he is not hustling to mow lawns, walk dogs, or anything. No matter what I make him do, he is going to hate it. But I cannot just let him do whatever he wants. We have him every other week, and he says his mom lets him sleep and play whenever he wants. That’s her prerogative in her home, but I cannot do that. It will drive me mad if he retreats in his room all day, sleeping and playing video games. When I met him, he was a sweet kid who didn’t mind being around us, but now he is a surly teen who can’t stand to do anything. Even getting him to do the expected chores is like pulling teeth. I am not sure what are reasonable rules and expectations for this young teen. Do you have any guidance?

—Congratulations, It’s a Boy and He’s 13!

Dear Congrats,

This is both super hard and super normal. As you say, it is entirely age-appropriate for a 13-year-old to want to behave like this all the time. It’s also entirely appropriate for a parent to intervene to stop it. Ideally, you will land somewhere in the middle.

At the very minimum, this kid should be doing chores in a specific and timely fashion, so this is a situation where a little bit of work upfront will pay dividends later. You should make a very clear set of chores and be specific about when they are to be done and what “done” looks like. So rather than take out trash it should be take out trash, recycling, and compost by 8 p.m. every Monday, Thursday, and Saturday, or whatever. We covered some good chores in a post here.

I tend to think that behavior management can be imagined on two axes: intrinsic to extrinsic motivation along one axis, and positive to negative motivation along the other. The trick is knowing where to situate your intervention given the circumstances. Your kid does not have intrinsic motivation to do chores, and positive motivation (“If you do this, you’ll reap financial rewards”) isn’t working. So, were I in your shoes, I would lean toward negative, extrinsic motivation. Namely: If you don’t do these chores, you lose the screens. Period. You’d have to think through the details and loopholes a kid is likely to exploit, so I might put a chart on the wall and declare that there must be a 100 percent completion rate for the week. Otherwise, the screens are gone. Then, if he makes it through the next week, he gets them back. You could also do this on a daily rather than weekly basis.

Maybe, if there’s a lot of backlash, you can set it up as a monthlong policy that expires after four weeks but can be reinstated if there is trouble. Running a household is a bit like governing a country, and nowadays kids can benefit from some examples of seeing it done well. (No shade.) (Who am I kidding? Shade.)

I want to acknowledge that I offer this advice with absolutely no idea how your stepparenting thing is going otherwise. It’s hard enough to lay down the law as a lifelong parent; it’s even harder to do so if you’ve only been in the kid’s life for a few years. So it might be prudent to make your husband take the lead on this particular strategy. But either way, the point is that while you’ll never get him to spend all of his free time working around the house and volunteering at the animal shelter, you also can’t leave him entirely to his own incredibly young and immature devices. You have to begin pulling him toward the middle. Good luck.

—Carvell Wallace

From: A Mom With an Asterisk. (Jan. 16th, 2019)

Dear Care and Feeding,

We are very fortunate to have three sets of grandparents that are all loving, kind, and very involved in our 6-month-old daughter’s life. My parents are divorced and both remarried, so we have some “step-grandparents” in the mix. Everyone gets along, and while my in-laws live far away, they visit often and get weekly updates on the baby.

The problem is my father’s wife. My dad got remarried when I was in my early 20s (I’m in my early 30s now), so while I’ve known his wife for a long time, she was not involved in raising me. She’s very sweet but she has a major problem with anxiety. EVERYTHING is stressful, she constantly worries about anything that could possibly go wrong, and she seems to be one step away from a nervous breakdown at all times.

For example, we have a sweet dog and she won’t come over because she’s afraid the dog might jump on her while she’s holding the baby and she could then drop her. This means anytime she wants to see our daughter—and I do try to balance getting everyone equal time because I don’t want any hurt feelings—I have to drive an hour each way to go to her house. Last time we were over, she wouldn’t let my daughter play with anything that had touched the floor because of germs, even though I told her we weren’t overly concerned about normal exposure and we had also put a clean blanket down.

Normal play such as holding her up to pretend-airplane, blow raspberries on her stomach, or sit on dad’s shoulders is met with gasps and clutching of the sofa arms. She makes me and my husband feel on edge during every visit, and we leave feeling exhausted and burnt out managing her anxiety.
I know babies are little sponges, and I really don’t want our daughter picking up this constant stress or mimicking any of these behaviors. Can I say anything to my dad or his wife? Do I just limit contact? What do I say when they ask why we can’t come over?

—Just Trying to Stay Calm

Dear JTtSC,

I deeply relate to this! People who freak out about every little thing are a real trigger for my own impatience. “WHY CAN’T EVERYBODY JUST BE F*&KING CHILL?!!!” I yell inside my head like a very cool and normal and chill dude.

It is, of course, maddening. Having a baby is stressful enough without someone clutching their pearls at every turn and making us feel like we, as new parents, are lacking the proper vigilance.

I have two pieces of good news for you. No. 1 is that you don’t have to deal with this on the regular, just as a part of these (thankfully) rare visits. This means that for the vast majority of the year, you can raspberry your child and toss her into the heavens until your heart is content. The other piece of good news is that this is not your problem. It belongs squarely to your dad’s wife. You are under no obligation to take on another person’s worry if you, yourself are not worried. I realize that’s easier said than done, but it’s kind of like the first rule of healthy boundaries: If you are unbothered, be unbothered and don’t let the bothered bother you.

So what would happen if you didn’t burn yourself out “managing her anxiety”? What if you didn’t manage it at all? There is no more direct path to unnecessary suffering than trying to manage the irrational feelings of another person, and it feels to me like you are borrowing trouble here. Let her panic and clutch. Let her moan and gnash her teeth. You are parenting just fine and if she can’t see that, then that’s on her.

I would recommend talking to your dad and seeing what he has to offer on the situation, though I suspect it won’t be much. Secondly, I call for keeping a healthy distance between her and your parenting by letting the visits be as infrequent as you can get away with. And when you finally do visit, practice the sentence, “I know this bothers you, but we’re fine with it”—over and over again until it sticks. Good luck.

—C.W.

From: My Stepmother Is a Nervous Wreck Around My Baby. (January 30th, 2019).

Classic Prudie

My boyfriend of two years says that he will not ask me to marry him unless I take a lie detector test to pinpoint the truth about certain things that have gone on in our relationship. I have been faithful and honest to him throughout the time we have been dating, with the exception of getting caught in some white lies about things that occurred before we were together. He says that if I have lied about little things, then I could lie about big things, and he needs to know he can trust me.

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