My son, Jonathan, had chores... if he got bored.... I could always find him something to do.
He still played video games, but he had to earn the privilege.
Even my mentally handicapped son, Joshua, has chores... like picking up his room and yard chores. We try to keep him mobile and motivated.
When I was a kid... both my parents worked and didn't get home until 5:30 - 6pm.
Me and my brother (who was 2 years my senior) were expected to clean the house and have dinner started by the time they got home... and this was when we were 10-12 years old. Kids today would have the house burned down.
We heated with wood... so there was wood to chop (with a mallet & chisel) the hard way... on weekends we'd go to a wooded area with our dad and he'd cut down a tree, cut it up, & we would load the truck up. When we got home we would unload the wood into a pile, that later would have to be busted up and moved to the burn pile, for the woodstove.
During the summer it was gardening... my grandma lived across the road from us and we'd plant, weed, harvest, shell & put up veggies.. So summer vacation wasn't a big vacation for us.
Our payment you ask??? We got to eat, we stayed warm, had a roof over our heads and learned to value what we had..... because even as kids... we had to work for it.
There were pigs to be slopped... cows to be fed... and when they were slaughtered we had meat in the freezer. We didn't have any chickens.. my dad hated them for some reason.
Sometimes we'd take on a summer job barning tobacco, to help buy our school clothes.
I don't regret my childhood.... we didn't have the spare time to be bored.
