Committed to finding ways out of the coercion/self-sacrifice mire of conventional parenting. We are variously critical rationalists, libertarians, home educators, attachment-parents, but we take our ideas where we find them.
We like your comments! (click on "Comment" under the blog posts and add your views). Rational Parenting respects children's privacy: please do not reveal personal information about identifiable individuals without their informed consent.
Email us with your comments on the blog, or suggestion for Problem of the Week!
1. If you don't wash your clothes for ages, when you do it's like Christmas because you've got loads of great clothes to choose from suddenly.
2. Defrost the freezer. Kids love doing it, and playing with the ice. When it's done, you can open the door and see a non-icy near-empty freezer (you threew away all the out-of-date stuff you didn't want, too) and you will feel like you are a Rich Person.
(By "feeling coerced" I mean just feeling bad or horrible about something in some way, rather than enjoying it)
I just got in from a morning (approx 1pm to 3pm) walking round town, and there are too many things I want to do all at once. I want to sew some buttons on a dress so it can be worn as soon as possible, put some willow trellis up in the garden because I'm excited about doing that, make a toasted sandwich because I'm hungry and that's my current favourite lunch, hang up some washing so it dries and another lot of washing can go in because I want more clean underwear, tidy up the kitchen because I like it tidy because there is space to make toasted sandwiches and I know where everything is quicker, and blog this and another blog about the great things I bought while out.
It occurred to me that people might enjoy jobs like tidying more, if they had more time, or felt they had as much time as they wanted, to do those jobs in. I might possibly be feeling coerced about the messy kitchen, and be thinking something like, "I can't make the sandwich easily because of the mess! I want a tidy kitchen before I cook! Why can't I afford a cleaner?" or similar, if I wasn't so flawlessly rational of course (joke, of course).
So anyway: another idea about solving the housework problem might be either to get more time for housework (which could sound paradoxical, but change you from hating it to enjoying it) OR to relax and not feel as hectic and rushed (similar to having more time, in ideas-terms, it seems to me).
And/ or, think of temporary solutions when immediate preferences don't fit with this: I'm going to clear a small space for sandwich-making, to begin with, then come back to the other tidying later.
Tidiness and house-cleaning must be one of the all-time biggest parenting/family issues. It comes up again and again. I think our ideas about caring for ourselves and our property optimally must get mixed up at a very early age, much of the time.
What should you do if, as Alexandra mentions in the comment below, one person in your household prefers a different level of tidiness in shared living-areas than another person?
First of all, I would say this problem can be solved, and adopting a position of self-sacrifice ("I put up with her mess... she owes me" OR "I tidy up because he wants me to... he owes me") is a) optional, and b) not a particularly great idea. Better to do better than that. Not that it's necessarily easy to solve: but giving up more or less guarantees failure. At least regarding any compromise as second-rate and putting some kind of ongoing energy into looking for better solutions improves your chances of getting free of the corrosiveness of long-term self-sacrifice, whether it gets resentfully destructive or simply demoralisingly repetitively irritating or draining.
Here are my ideas on the subject so far- not at all the last word, I must stress:
1. What's wrong with the person who wants tidiness doing the tidying? If others disagree about the necessity for shoes to go in shoe racks, why should the tidy person enforce their will on them?
2. Separate spaces and territories for different people reduces the level of conflict over tidiness. (When children are very young and need lots of help finding lost things in their rooms, they are also generally perfectly happy to let you tidy those rooms. Later on, things often change).
3. Think about tidying in practical terms first and foremost: look for short-cuts and clever tips that enable you to get jobs done more efficiently. Even small things like the position of a laundry bin can make lots of difference. There are internet lists and sites full of cleaning tips (more evidence of how big the problem is for how many people).
4. If you want a tidy room for aesthetic reasons, aiming for one room, ideally your own private room, is more realistic than trying to get a whole house arranged just so when other people are living in it. This goes for stressed housewives as well as tyrannical husbands.
5. No-one has an automatic right to a tidy home when their co-habitees do not share their preferences. Marriage, co-habitation and having been brought up somewhere filthy, average or spotless, do not confer such a right.
6. No-one has an obligation to fulfil someone else's tidiness expectations without having agreed freely and willingly to do so. Marriage, co-habitation and having been brought up somewhere filthy, average or spotless, do not confer such an obligation.
