Old Enough

At what age is it appropriate to start having children do more for themselves? I'm ready to hand over some household responsibility.

The child in my home is going to be 12 in just a couple more months. The husband says that he's going through a transformation...he's beginning to take pride in the way he dresses, he's making semi-good attempts to comb his hair in a presentable fashion and he cares if his shoes get dirty. Jason says that he's at the age where "he can smell his own piss". (Please, don't ask. There are lots of Jasonisms that fly around this house daily). So I'm wondering if I can slap some more responsibility on his ever broadening shoulders and growing ego.

Young D already has a list of chores that are posted on the fridge that need to be completed daily. The only supposed exceptions to the latter are large amounts of homework, baseball or football games/practices. Sometimes the get out of jail free card is used for a number of other less important things like American Idol or Dad wants to go somewhere and doesn't feel like waiting for Poky Joe to finish washing the dishes or walking the dog. But that's a whole other issue, let's not go there today.

Anyway...I figure it's time for the young buck to learn how to do laundry. His own, of course. I wouldn't dare let him touch my clothes. He does enough damage to mine by leaving chocolate bars and ink pens in the pockets of his blue jeans.

If I may be honest here, my motive is two fold. First, I HATE doing laundry and I have no idea how three people can create sooooo much of it. And on the rare occasion that I've managed to get all the dirty clothes washed (just as I've finished my victory dance) the little man has this magical way of conjuring up two or three more loads that have mysteriously been placed in the corner of his closet. Not by him, of course, but by the little people who live under the floor-boards. Those bastards really irk me, I'm going to have to call the little-people exterminators to handle that one. Moving on. I've decided that if he washes his own clothes, I'll no longer need to be concerned with the dirty clothes that pop up out of thin air once I'm done dealing with the laundry demons. He can have his own hamper. In his own room. Then it's no longer MY issue.

Second, I think it's time for the young man of the house to see what it's like to be a bit more responsible for himself. It's time for him to learn exactly WHY you can't tell someone that your uniform is dirty 20 minutes before the game. He needs to learn that life will run much more smoothly when you don't wait until you've completely run out of clean underware to ask if anyone washed clothes the night before.


Seriously, the most important factor here...I don't want to have to wash so many damn clothes. PERIOD. He's old enough, right? Besides, my mom always told me that one of the plus sides of having children around the house is having the authority to make them do the stuff parents don't want to do. So maybe I'll approach this new task for D as a scientific experiment proving her theory.