The Secret to Raising Successful Kids #80

If your child resists helping, makes a bigger mess, or melts down during cleanup—this changes how you’ll see it.

If you’ve ever thought “it’s just faster if I do it myself,” you’re not alone. When your toddler refuses to listen, turns simple tasks into chaos, or has a meltdown over cleaning up, it can feel pointless to even try. But what looks like small, frustrating moments—spilled food, ignored requests, messy “helping”—are actually shaping your child’s emotional regulation, confidence, and long-term behavior in powerful ways. This video breaks down what research really says about chores, and how to use them in a way that reduces power struggles instead of creating more of them.

What You’ll Learn:

•  Why chores build confidence, emotional resilience, and real-world skills (not just “helpfulness”) 
•  The hidden reason kids resist helping—and how to shift it without bribing or nagging 
•  How chores reduce entitlement and increase empathy over time 
•  3 simple, age-appropriate ways to start involving your toddler or preschooler today 
•  Why paying for chores can backfire (and what to do instead) 

This approach is grounded in developmental psychology and neuroscience—but translated into real-life parenting. No scripts that fall apart the moment your child is overwhelmed. No pressure to be perfect. Just practical ways to help your child feel capable, connected, and motivated to contribute—without turning every moment into a battle.

If you’re tired of second-guessing yourself or feeling like every small moment turns into a struggle, this is exactly the kind of shift that makes parenting feel lighter. Subscribe so you can handle these everyday challenges with more clarity, more confidence, and a lot less stress.

Transcript

Chores As A Success Predictor

Jon @WholeParent 0:00

So there's this thing in child development research. Something that we have found in the data that is really surprising. It's one factor that can predict whether a child is most likely to be successful later in life or not. And it's not the things that you might think. It actually has nothing to do with the inbuilt biology of the child. It's not intelligence. It's not grades. It's not sports. It's something really surprising. It's whether or not they did chores. Welcome back to the Whole Parent Podcast. My name is John. I'm a parenting researcher, author, PhD student with a background in counseling. And I'm also a data four, which means I see what actually works, not just what's supposed to work, day-to-day, and what's, you know, just cut on paper. So here's where I've found these massive gaps in parenting advice, right? On the one side, we have research, brain development, behavioral neuroscience, attachment research, developmental psychology, and all of that is incredibly valuable, but it feels really abstract and hard to apply and disconnected from what's actually happening in your home when your kid's melting down or completely ignoring you. And then on the other side, you've got the like influencer, mommy blogger, parenting advice tips and scripts and quicks quick fixes. And some of that seems to work in the moment, but usually it falls apart when things get kind of intense, or it just doesn't hold up across other situations, or it works for a little while, but it stops working. This podcast in its totality is designed to fill that gap. We're trying to take science and translate it into something that you can actually use. So today it's just me. I'm coming to you recording this episode fresh off of cleaning up after dinner. Like truly cleaning up, not the, you know, I piled everything in the sink just so that I could deal with it tomorrow version of cleaning up. No, like I did the full cleaning thing. Counters wiped, dishwasher loaded and started, the floor was swept. I even got on my hands and knees and like scrubbed off those parts where like yogurt drips were or like where mud got tracked in. Maybe that's normal for you. This is like a deep clean for us, or I guess for me. And here's kind of a crazy thing that happened. It was right before bedtime, and my kid, who's five, had been totally melting down about something really small. And he winds up standing up on the chair next to me, wiping down the table. It's actually a big bench, right? And he's like making it worse than it was, because I kind of did like the initial wipe down, but then I got like the rag, it was wet with soapy water and put it up there. And he had just like tried to wipe down the floor with this rag, and so he's literally bringing dirt onto the table that wasn't there before. But when he finished, he looks at me, table's still a mess. Like, did you see that? And he was proud, like really proud. And I had this moment where I thought to myself, like, oh yeah, this is it. This is the stuff that feels small. This is the stuff that is so often really annoying. And yet, this is the stuff that is building something way deeper than we realize. So today I'm taking a detour to what I was going to talk about, to talk about chores. Not in the how do I get my kid to help more way, but in the like why chores actually matter developmentally way. So if you've ever wondered, should I be making my kids do chores or is it really worth the effort? I could be done in five minutes if I don't involve them, then this episode might make you see th say things, see things a little bit differently. Let's get into it. So let's just be real about this topic for a second. I think most of us hate chores. We hate it even more when it takes 10 times longer to do the things that we have to do because we wind up involving our kids and we end up just doing everything ourselves anyway, right? So we think to ourselves like it's faster, it's easier, I don't want to fight about this for 20 minutes before I even get started. But slowly, without even realizing it, we wind up removing our kids from their rightful place as a contributing member to our family. And we kind of let them go play quietly while we just do a quick tidy up, right? And then for them, it feels kind like we think that it's feeling kind of the moment, but in the long term, we're actually taking something that's incredibly valuable away from them. So I'm gonna break down first what the research says on this, and then I'm gonna go over four reasons why chores actually make way more sense than you think. And then I'm at the end, I'm gonna give you three chores that I think basically everybody should absolutely start having their kids do, starting now, starting today. So that's where we're going, and here we go. Uh we tend to think about chores about like as if they are some form of responsibility. But what research actually shows is that it's actually giving our sense, our kid a sense of belonging, right? Not like a burden, but belonging. So when a child contributes to a household, even in these kind of small innocuous ways, they're not doing a task. They're learning, hey, I'm a part of this thing, like I'm a part of something. And what I do affects other people. And this is a critical like developmental milestone for our kids to understand. Because one of the strongest drivers of emotional security is when kids feel like they belong to a system, not just like they're being taken care of, but that they are actually contributing to the whole system, right? The family system. And so what we see is like research out of Harvard highlighting that chores are helping kids understand what unseen work is that keeps the family running, which in turn builds empathy for their parents and perspective taking, and it sets them up to be someone who actually contributes in relationships later on. Never forget that really perspective taking and empathy are the basis for all healthy relationships. And people often say to me, like, how do how do I get my kid to not be entitled? And one of the main ways of doing this can be with chores, not because we're like burdening them with things to do, but because of what I just said, what Harvard's showing us, right? That that it gives them a sense of empathy and perspective taking, which we now know perspective taking is like the opposite of entitlement. So the first takeaway here is that chores are not about making kids helpful to us, right? It's not about making our lives more convenient. They're actually about helping our kids feel like they matter. So that's number one. Number two is that chill, chores tend to build self-efficacy in kids. So just that sense that like they can do hard things, like that sense that they can accomplish things. This is one of the biggest predictors of long-term emotional mental health, as well as what I said at the beginning, like success. So it's more than intelligence, it's more than talent, is this concept of self-efficacy, an internal locus of control. Do I believe that I can figure things out and I have agency over my life? Like, do I think that I can do things, can do hard things? And chores are one of the easiest, simplest ways that you can build that in a kid really early on, because they give kids this clear, visible task, right? With a clear, visible outcome and a sense of completion when that task is completed. And so what the research is actually showing us in this is that kids who regularly do chores early on, like literally five years old, kindergarten. Like I said, my son is five, he's in kindergarten, tend to show higher levels of self-efficacy. And that then generates stronger academic confidence, confidence in every aspect, athletic confidence, if you care about that, because like the it's it's the self-efficacy kind of filters into all things. And so, even in social skills, like they have better social skills because they like they have this sense of this underlying confidence that they can do hard things. And it's not just correlation in the moment, it holds true over time as well. So, in one long, uh large-scale longitudinal study, so this is following kids for a long period of time, not just at one snapshot, and it's a large group, it's like 10,000 kids. The kids who did chores more consistently were likely to see themselves as capable in school more than the kids who didn't, feel more confident in peer relationships, and show more pro-social behavior, which is, you know, things like helping and cooperating and contributing and just generally being like a contributing member of society. And here's why I think that happens, or why the research shows me that that happens, is that chores give kids these repeated real experiences of like I did that thing. I did something, it worked, I can do it again. And that, those repeated, remember, like the way that our kids learn things is not, oh, I did this big thing once. I think that's a lot of us as adults, we the things that stick in our memories are the big moments often, or we think that those are the things that stick in our memories. What we actually know is that confidence and self-efficacy in these things are built by small, repeated victories. It's kind of like, okay, I go to the gym and I try to like lift this really big weight one time, and we're like, yeah, I really worked out today. No, like that you that's not how you get stronger. How you get stronger is by going every single day and doing a little bit, right? And once that belief is there, it winds up spilling over. So it might start as like I can help with you know these chores, small chores, cleaning up, uh setting the table, whatever. It winds up spilling over into other aspects of their life. So in school, it becomes like I can figure that out. In friendships, it becomes I can, you know, figure out how to solve this problem that I'm having. When other life challenges, it's I don't have to give up right away. And these are the things that oftentimes we put our kids in activities out in the world. Like when we were signing up our kid for taekwondo, which is the thing I talked about with my wife in the last episode, one of the things that they said is like this is gonna build a lot of confidence in your kids because they're gonna see, like, I can do that. But like you don't have to pay hundreds of dollars for taekwondo classes and like take them to a place across town to do that. Like literally in your kitchen, you can build those exact same skills. And it's not that these chores are directly making the kids like smarter, it's that they're building an underlying belief system that eventually drives that success. And that's the thing that I really want to hone in on here. And then the third one, which I've already kind of alluded to at the beginning, is that chores build empathy and perspective taking. And I this is like massively underestimated because I can't tell you every single counseling relationship that I've like relationship that I've counseled. So, and I'm talking about adults now, right? I'm not talking about kids. When I do marriage counseling for somebody, I can tell you without a shadow of a doubt, the thing that is lacking in 99% of cases is not like this abstract communication, which everybody says. Like it's not infidelity, although that's sometimes a problem. It is always perspective taking and empathy. Like if I can get both people to do perspective taking and empathy, I can almost always figure out a path forward with them. But if you can't, then you can't. And this this is so predictive of long-term success in all aspects. This is just like being a good human, is perspective taking empathy. So it's like it literally does not like empathy cannot come from being told, like, let's think about how this person feels. It comes from repeated experiences, the same way that confidence is built. And so when a kid helps you clean up or helps the family, I should say, clean up, they're not, they're not helping you, they're contributing to the family or cook or carry the groceries in or organize. Like when they do these things, they start to see, like, oh, this doesn't just happen. These things, uh, effort goes into all of these individual tasks, that subconscious or or or uh invisible labor of the of domestic labor of the home. And they can actually start to see what other people are doing for them, like constantly, all the time, and that they are not going to notice otherwise. And so there's this other thing out of Harvard, and I'm gonna look this up right now. It's the making caring common project. Uh, it showed that when kids are expected to contribute at home, they are most likely to test higher on empathy and perspective taking skills. Specifically because they're exposed to the needs of other people and their own personal system and belief system at home. So I don't know if I read that in the right way, but understand this that when you raise kids who notice when somebody needs help and they appreciate what other people are doing for them, right? They're grateful and they don't just assume that everything appears for them in a world where like everything else is instant and automated and invisible, like that kind of awareness when your kid understands that they are set up for so much more success, but it doesn't just happen on its own, it has to be built. Okay, fourth thing I said I was gonna give you four things is that chores build executive functioning. And this is where chores directly are gonna contribute to brain development in young kids. Executive functioning is one of those skills that develops later. And this is especially true if you have neurodivergent kids. Now, here's a note with neurodivergent kids they often have the hardest time doing the chores because they don't have that internal reward system all the time for like, oh, I did a good job with this, but they're often the ones who most need it, again, because of the structure, because of the confidence, but also because they're building executive functioning. So they're literally training their brain specifically uh for this concept, like the management system of the brain. And that allows your child to plan and stay focused and shift between tasks and remember sequency, right? Like, what am I supposed to be doing? And how do I follow through with that until it's actually finished? This is the thing that I struggle with the most as a person with ADHD. Like, I don't always complete chores to their completion. Like I will do all the dishes in the sink and leave two of them in there. And part of that is that I haven't trained, like I've I've had to train myself with chores to complete things all the way. So when we talk about chores, we're not just talking about helping around the house. We're actually talking about giving your kids a brain rep in one of the greatest predictors, again, of success, the skill sets that they're ever gonna have to develop. Because every single chore, even something really simple, is actually a pretty complex sequence of cognitive like hoops that they have to drop through. So when you say something like put your toys away, for example, your child isn't just moving objects from one place to another. They're actually planning, like, okay, how am I gonna do this? Where does this go? And then uh, should I make piles of the toys or should I just do all these types of toys once? Should I keep like, should I just do one at a time? Should I like move from one end of the room to the other? And and as they're doing this, they're sequencing, like, okay, what am I gonna do next? What should I do first? What should I do last? And they're using their working memory as this is going on, like what was I just asked to do? And then they are task switching as they're doing that. Like, okay, now I have to stop playing so that I can start cleaning. And they're practicing follow-through. Like, is the room actually clean? I have to keep going until it's done. And all of these things are executive, like these are this is the baseline of executive functioning. Now, if your kid is really little, they're gonna need help doing this, right? But it it doesn't happen unless they do it, if that makes sense. Like it develops through doing, through repetition. And where chores are incredibly powerful because they c create this consistent real life opportunity for kids to practice these skills in a way that actually sticks, is like like that's that's the whole piece here. Like that's what you're missing if you're not doing chores. So um let me take a break here, and then when we come back, I want to talk about a piece that always always comes up with chores. A question about whether we should be paying our kids. Alrighty, so let's talk about the the big question, as I call it with chores, which is money, should I be paying my kids an allowance for doing their chores? Um, my answer to that is based on developmental research around chores. It's not based on what was done to me, it's not based on like what I arbitrarily think. But what research indicates, and I this is gonna be a this is gonna be maybe a tough pill for many of you to swallow, is that really the answer here is no. Uh chores shouldn't be tied to money because these are like these aren't extra things that they're doing that they're earning for. These are a part of being a part of a family, right? Like they're not gonna be paid to do this in their own home growing up. And if we tie every single contribution to payment, we're actually wiring their brain to think, okay, I should only help if I'm gonna get something out of it. And that's not pro-social. Like, that's actually antisocial thinking. That's capitalist thinking, and I'm not gonna go in like a big rant, anti-capitalist rant here, but um, it's also just like impractically, like it's it's in practicality, it's just not how real life works. You don't get paid to clean your kitchen. I hope if you do, like we'll talk about that, but uh you don't get paid to do your laundry. Uh, you do it because you're part of the team. Now, you might pay someone else to do those things if you're you know affluent and you need help doing those things or something. But uh you if you're just talking about the actual contribution to your family, like we don't pay our spouse to do those things. Um so I would say no to that. Now, can kids earn money like in general? Sure. For sure, for extra things, right? So, like if your kid, if you like this was something that my dad did with me, and again, I'm I'm trying to like separate this from chores because chores are a place where you shouldn't be putting monetary compensation. But if you like my dad used to paint one side of my house, I lived in a wood house. He used to paint one side of my house every year, so every four years the whole house would be painted. If I like scraped all the paint off of one gigantic side of my house, like my dad would give me he'd pay me by the hour or something. But that was not like a baseline expectation of contributing to the family. Like I wasn't getting paid to do the dishes, and I think that was just intuitive for them, but unfortunately, uh it's less intuitive these days, I think. And it just winds up kind of creating this issue. We're trying to incentivize it, right? Like, and we were trying to give our kids money. And I'm not even saying that you shouldn't give your kids like an allowance in general, like every week they get a certain amount of money. But the the thing I'm trying to strongly caution against here is not doing that with money. So uh if you want to know the place to start here, I think that there are three really simple ones that basically kids for like from age let's say four on should be at least we're we're at least starting to introduce these things. The first one is is just the most natural consequence that you can possibly have, which is if your kid makes a mess, they should at least assist in cleaning up their own mess. So whatever they can use, they can clean up. So if they can take out the toys, they can put the toys away. If they can go get their own food, they can put the food back where it goes, or they can bring their dish to the sink after they're done. If they're taking out the markers and taking all the caps off the markers, they can also put the caps back on the markers. And they don't have to do this perfectly. Like the goal is not that you don't have to do it. The goal is the habit. When you make a mess, you clean it up. And I'm gonna just say for the record that I wish somebody had taught me this earlier in life. I'm still learning this. Like, I'm the type who just like leaves it all around the house, then I have to do a big clean at the end of the night. And I wish somebody had taught me that. So if kids make a mess, you they have to clean it up. And you can help them, but they should always participate in cleaning up. So I'll give you a great example of this. Um, my son spilled red food coloring water on the the carpet in the front room of our house. He obviously couldn't clean that up. He was he's only four, but I had him uh plug in the carpet cleaner that I have like a little tiny spot clean carpet cleaner. I had him plug it in for me, I had him sit. Next to me. I had him get a towel for me so that I could dry it up when it's done. And so I was the one actually doing the cleaning, but he was contributing. So even if they can't do the whole cleaning thing their cell them themselves, just contributing in some way to that. Second thing, I think kids should be helping with meals. And you can start this so early, like way earlier than most of us think. Two-year-olds stirring, pouring, carrying something to the table. Please watch your kids while they're doing this. When I was two, I was helping my mom stir a pot of boiling water, or of I think I was stirring maybe pasta in the boiling water. I don't remember exactly what I was doing. But uh my mom turned around to yell at my my brother about ironically not doing his chores, and I pulled the pot down on my hand and got like third-degree burns on my wrist and had to go to the hospital and be in a cast and all this stuff. So monitor your kids, but they can do a lot of stuff. Uh carrying, you know, setting the table, carrying stuff, grabbing forks for somebody, like it does not have to be super complicated, right? But like easy stuff, um, do it. And the reason why I say meals is because this has the added benefit is if you have a picky eater, picky eaters who help prepare the food are way less picky about the food that they help prepare. So meals should be one of the most consistent rhythms in your home. Uh, even if you're not like sitting down for a formal dinner or anything like that, they're they just happen every day, right? Often multiple times a day, or I hope the multiple times a day. And they're just one of the clearest places where a kid can see something happen so repetitiously that they can contribute in a real visible way. And I'm not saying like that they have to help you cook, because for some people, like for my for my wife, like that's like a no non-starter. Honestly, as we've had more and more kids, we rarely help have our kids help us cook because it's just like too overstimulating and chaotic. Like we're just a lot of times cooking is like happening off to the side. And again, I don't want to like turn away and then my kid pulls a pot of boiling water. Maybe that's just like my trauma. But uh, if you're able to have like one of the parents in the kitchen while everybody else is like off somewhere else, and you just have one kid up there chopping up veggies, like more power to you. I'm I'm in awe of you if you do that. Shout out all the TikTok people who have their kids doing this. I I can't. It just it's my my my kids' healthy with dinner is limited to like them bringing cups to the table or bringing or like handing them a head of broccoli while they're sitting on the floor and they just like rip it apart. Um But yeah, like it's just it's too chaotic for me. And I will say this, uh sometimes I give my kids fake jobs, right? And that's like I'm not saying that this is the gold standard of parenting, but like I'll give my kids fake jobs, like, oh, just like stir this butter, this melted butter and this thing together. Like I didn't really need those things, but just have them do it, and then I maybe I'll like just toss it somewhere. Anyway, that's enough about mealtime. For sure, the easiest one is bringing their bowl and plate back to the at the end of the mealtime, bringing their bowl and plate to the sink. Very helpful. Uh third one is I think you can have your kids do what I did today, which is participating in what we call a reset. So at the end of the day, after dinner, before we either like go to whatever event, but especially before bedtime, everybody helps. And it's just a shared space. We put on music, we like just we understand that we have to reset the house for the next day to keep it livable. So, of course, you know, your kids are going to say as this happens, which by the way, my kids still do every single day. They say, Oh, but I wasn't the one who took out that thing, or I wasn't the one who put the couch cushions on the floor, or I didn't do this. Um, the thing that I just find myself saying over and over, it's like, doesn't matter because you're part of the family and we take care of things together. So, like I clean up your messes, or you know, I clean up stuff that I don't always make. That's just what it is. So if you can get your kids to help you reset the house, that's one of those things where then when they wake up the next morning, they like see the tangible evidence that they did something, and it's like really rewarding. So, yeah. So here's what I want to leave you with today. Chores are not about raising helpful kids. They're about raising capable human beings who are healthy. That's what this whole channel is about: raising healthy, happy kids who know how to go through the world with confidence and health in all areas of their life. Uh, part of that is raising kids who understand empathy and perspective taking, who know that they belong, who then know that they can do hard things, who know that like they can contribute and not just be consumers. And of course, that is slower and it's messier and it takes more patience. But you're building something that is gonna stay with your child for the rest of their life. And it's something that only happens through repetition. So that's what I have for you today. If you like this stuff, make sure that you go and check out uh the membership that's reopening back up. I'm calling it Parent Lab. I'm gonna give you more insight and stuff into that in the show notes and uh coming up. I won't have it ready for you for this episode, but yeah, just stay, keep keep keep your ears perked because there's fun stuff coming with that. I'll see you in the next one. Thank you for your time listening to the whole parent podcast today. I hope you got something out of it. I have a couple quick favors to ask of you as we end the episode. The first one is to jump over on whatever podcast platform that you are listening to right now and rate this show five stars. You'll notice there are a lot of five-star ratings on this show, whether that's on Spotify or Apple Music or Apple Podcasts. We have a ton of five-star ratings and it helps our podcast get out to more people than almost any other parenting podcast out there. And so it's a really quick thing that you can do if you have 15 or 20 seconds. And if you have an additional 30 seconds, I'd love to read a review from you. I read all the reviews that come through. 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