Stop Calling Chores a 'Favour': Why One Parent Is Changing How Her Family Talks About Housework

The sentences are small and ordinary. Can you do me a favour and set the table? Can you help me bring the laundry downstairs? Do me a favour and grab milk on your way home. In a CBC parenting essay published in January 2020, one writer argues that these everyday requests have been quietly teaching her family the wrong lesson.

She says she only recently noticed the pattern. Her children, and to some extent her husband, expect her to run the house, and she concludes she trained them to. By framing every task as a favour, she has led them to believe that when they do something at home, they are helping her rather than helping the household.

She traces her role as the family's main manager of domestic responsibilities to a big cross-province move and lifestyle change eight years ago. She doesn't resent it. She says she is good at it and, with a few exceptions, enjoys it. The problem, as she sees it, is that asking for favours made her the sole beneficiary in her children's eyes. Emptying the dishwasher, a job they should be doing anyway, became a kindness to her instead of a contribution to keeping the home from sliding into chaos. She writes that she tries not to take credit for what her kids have learned, but this lesson is entirely her doing.

The cost, in her telling, is a kind of ledger. Her children now treat washing dishes as a pat on her back, one they may eventually collect on with a "now you pat mine." She says she already pats plenty of backs. She notes that the standard advice, such as charts, allowances, set times and clear expectations, is easy to find. Her own contribution, a system she calls "I owe you one," produced little beyond low-level parental rage and a longing for the years when her kids were three and thought washing dishes in the sink was fun.

She places her household inside a wider pattern. Women do more domestic work, she writes, and it has been heavily documented. She cites a 2015 Statistics Canada report finding that women do nearly three more hours of unpaid labour at home than men, a gap she assumes extends to kids as well. She also points to the invisible load of planning carpools and tracking holiday to-do lists, which she says may even be contributing to mental health problems. She does not plan to hand those jobs to her children. But she wants them to understand that taking on housework helps rebalance the scales and adds to the home's functioning and the well-being of the people in it.

So she is changing her wording. She admits she isn't sure how she fell into asking for favours, since she calls herself fairly bossy with high expectations of her family. As a writer, she knows language matters, and she wonders whether the advice to "ask for what I need" backfired here. Her replacements are direct. Child A, it's your turn to take out the recycling. Child B, what could you do to make the house neat before company arrives? If nobody sets the table, nobody eats. And a fourth, which is plainly a joke: you are all ungrateful and I quit.

She hopes the first two will work well enough that she never needs the last two. Her larger aim is for her children to see themselves as productive members of the family, without expecting more payback than a comfortable, calm home. Whether the new phrasing changes anything is untested, and she closes by asking readers, as a favour, to tell her what they think.