essay about chores at home during mco

8 Lessons We've Learned From MCO And How We Can Move Forward Once It's Lifted

Welcome to the new normal. :)

Published for IJM Land , 04 May 2020, 05:48 PM

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If there’s one thing the Movement Control Order (MCO) has shown us, it’s to appreciate the little things in life

Before the start of the MCO, many of us would’ve taken for granted the simple joys of driving to work, meeting friends and family for meals, watching a movie, or cheering on our favourite football team at a nearby mamak over teh tarik and roti .

Almost two months into the MCO, our lives have changed dramatically. With most of the world on lockdown, we’ve had to adapt to new ways of living. Working from home is the new normal, e-learning through Zoom or Google Classroom is now a thing, and shopping online has become our go-to pastime.

While we all can't wait for this MCO to finally be over, like it or not, things will no longer go back to the way they once were

Here are a few things this mco has taught us and how we can move forward together to face what's next:, 1. we learned to appreciate our food a little more, from cooking at home and ordering in, to tapau-ing from local coffee shops.

This MCO has definitely brought our cooking skills up a level. In fact, it has given us a newfound respect for our mums and grandmas who used to cook three meals a day for us growing up. We've also grown to appreciate online food delivery - just imagine these few weeks without GrabFood and FoodPanda.

What's next:  Many Malaysians will probably cook more at home even after the MCO. However, it will be a challenging time for our local restaurants,  kopitiams,  and small food vendors. So, let's remember to support them by tapau-ing whenever we can right now, and visiting them once the MCO is lifted.

2. We became better at taking care of our health and personal hygiene

With the spread of the global COVID-19 pandemic, protecting our health has become our top priority. From washing our hands and using sanitiser, to wearing face masks and practicing social distancing, we've learned to take better care of ourselves and others. What's next: After the MCO is lifted, Malaysians will probably continue to practice certain social distancing measures. That means we'll have to adapt our day-to-day interactions, like shaking hands and hugging. Washing hands and wearing face masks will also be the new normal for a long time.

3. Even the least tech savvy among us have adapted to online services

With this extended MCO period, it has forced most of us to learn how to use online services, whether it's ordering food, paying our TNB bills, or getting into Zoom calls for meetings and classes. Even our parents and grandparents have grown to become more tech savvy to keep up with the times. What's next: The MCO has shown us that many things can actually be done online. Moving forward, we'll see more banks, schools, and companies offering digital services. That means we'll need to get used to doing things like banking, parent-teacher conferences, and client meetings online.

4. For those of us working remotely, we've learned to communicate better and be more efficient

Working from home has its perks, but it also comes with its own challenges, especially for parents with children at home. Nevertheless, the MCO has taught us how to be productive and not distracted. We've also learned to communicate clearly, whether it's through emails, video calls, or productivity apps. What's next: Working remotely may become the new normal after MCO. That means we'll need to manage our time better and become more efficient. We also need to build a culture of trust at work, empowering our teammates to get the job done – the last thing anyone wants is someone micro-managing them 24/7.

5. We've been reminded of how much our friends and loved ones mean to us <3

Before the MCO, we would try to plan gatherings and meetups, but we'd always fail because someone was busy. In the last few weeks, however, we've had all the time in the world to bond with people and reconnect with long-lost friends, thanks to Zoom hangouts and online games like Houseparty. What's next: Unexpectedly, the MCO has brought us all together and made us appreciate the people around us. It's also taught us that we'll never have time for each other until we choose to make time. If there's a friend or family member you haven't talked to in a while, give them a call today to show them you care – it will make their day!

6. We've learned how to manage our finances better and the importance of saving money

With the MCO, many Malaysians and businesses have been affected financially. It has taught us all to be more prudent with our spending, like finding ways to cook dishes that can last us for a few meals. Thanks to online shopping, we've also learned how to hunt for good deals online. What's next: The MCO has shown us how important it is to have savings that can tide us through challenging times like this. As the economy slowly builds back up and we return to our daily routines, we should be careful with our spending and always try to set aside money every month to build up our savings.

7. We also realised that there’s no better time to learn a new skill or pursue our passions than right now

Many Malaysians are using their extra time during the MCO to learn how to cook, pick up a new language, and even plant their own vegetables. Some parents have even revisited their old passions like music and become piano teachers for their children. For others, this MCO has given them time to reflect and plan ahead for their own business ideas. What's next:  The MCO has reminded all of us that there's no better time to do what we love or go after our dreams. Whatever you have on your mind to do, make it happen today!

8. Now that we spend most of our day indoors, we've really grown to appreciate the comforts of home

We've been able to take time to enjoy the comforts of home, whether it's sitting on our balcony to see the sunset, watching Netflix shows on our TV screen, or utilising every part of our kitchen. All in all, this MCO has made us realise how important it is to have a home that feels like home. What's next: It makes a difference when we get to stay in a home with enough space, a home where we can truly care for our family. While it's not something we should rush into, it's always a good idea to invest in a comfortable home that will last generations.

There’s just something special about having a place to call your own. That’s why Seremban 2 by IJM Land wants to help Malaysians to own a home at Rimbun Impian and Rimbun Alam with monthly cash payouts!

Seremban 2 by IJM Land understands the importance of having a comfortable home, which is why they want to make it easier for Malaysians to own a property. In fact, they are offering amazing deals for two of their homes – Rimbun Impian  and Rimbun Alam , both located within the exclusive integrated township of Seremban 2. So if you are thinking of buying a new home, don't worry. Even with all the uncertainties, we can always prepare for the worst and hope for the best. In fact, Seremban 2 by IJM Land will be giving you RM1,000 a month* until the home is completed and vacant possession is granted. Besides that, IJM Land will cover all legal fees, stamp duty, and even the downpayment. This means you can own your home at Seremban 2 completely hassle-free with zero entry fees. Find out more about this promotion on IJM Land's website  today!

Peace of mind is having a home designed to nurture, both for now and in the future. You can own a unit at Rimbun Impian, located within the exclusive guarded community and award-winning self-contained integrated township of Seremban, starting from RM669,420. Here are some of the other awesome features: • Freehold • Guarded community • Modern façade • Within an award-winning integrated township • Spacious layout • Digital lock • Smart home innovation • Internet infrastructure ready • Private central park and sporting courts Unit size:  22'x78' | 2,586 sqft or 24'x75' | 2,820 sqft

No matter what the future holds after this MCO, we know that we can move forward and face it because we're all in this together

For more #feelgood stories during mco:, netizens are in awe this oku woman is sewing ppe for frontliners using only her feet.

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• DOI: 10.24294/jipd.v8i9.5251
• Corpus ID: 272442370

The main life stressors of secondary school students during Movement Control Order (MCO) in Sabah, Malaysia

• Walton Wider , Bee Seok Chua , +5 authors Lester Naces Udang
• Published in Journal of Infrastructure… 5 September 2024
• Education, Sociology

Tables from this paper

37 References

Culturally responsive pedagogy aided by malay literature elements subvert the burn out learning among primary school students in pdpr.

• Highly Influential

Movement control as an effective measure against Covid-19 spread in Malaysia: an overview

Challenges of home learning during movement control order among uitm pahang students, satisfaction with life among public and private university students in sabah, malaysia: a modification scale using factor analysis, effect of emotional intelligence and personality traits on the psychological well-being of university students in malaysia, the interaction between academic stress and self-control in predicting psychological well-being, secondary school students’ school-related stressors during the coronavirus disease (covid-19) pandemic in sabah, malaysia, should i help prosocial behaviour during the covid-19 pandemic, an analysis by state on the effect of movement control order (mco) 3.0 due to covid-19 on malaysians' mental health: evidence from google trends, mental health risk factors and coping strategies among students in asia pacific during covid-19 pandemic—a scoping review, related papers.

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What are the main challenges parents face during the MCO?

Friday, 24 Apr 2020

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Working from home isn't easy when you have to keep your kids occupied and entertained throughout the day. — 123rf.com

Before the pandemic forced office workers to work from home as far as possible, working from home was always seen as a privilege; an idyllic arrangement where one no longer had to deal with long-commutes to and from work or being stuck for hours in traffic jams. Home-cooked lunches? What’s not to love?

Companies that offered their staff the flexibility of working from home were lauded and lifted up as examples to be followed as they gave employees, particularly new parents and workers who have to care for elderly parents or people with disabilities, a wonderful option.

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Balancing act

The hooi family believe in work-life balance and de-stress by spending time together in the evening. hooi (left) with three of his children in an inflatable pool. photo: andrew hooi, hooi, half-dressed for 'work from home', about to start a zoom meeting. photo: andrew hooi, hooi and khor believe in being a team, whether in work, in life, or even during the mco. photo: andrew hooi, indoor activities during the mco. hooi says such games teach players to strategise, think and calculate fast. photo: andrew hooi, abdul razak (left) and suriani (right) with their four children. photo: suriani mokhtar, abdul razak supervising one of his kids (who goes to a chinese primary school) as they do their revision. photo: suriani mokhtar, it's not easy to keep kids occupied and entertained when they are at home 24/7 because schools are closed during mco. photo: filepic, teaching kids new skills such as baking or cooking is a good way to keep them occupied and entertained. photo: filepic, suriani and abdul razak with their four children. the couple are taking it one day at a time through the mco period. photo: suriani mokhtar, working from home isn't easy when you have to keep your kids occupied and entertained throughout the day. — 123rf.com, suriani (lleft) often has to see to her children’s needs while attending to work and calls from the office. photo: suriani mokhtar.

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Tags / Keywords: family , Covid-19 pandemic , movement control order , MCO , working from home , meal preparations , parenting , educating children , household chores

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Living under the MCO (movement control order)

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Wong Soak Koon reflects on what life is like for her and others during these times of isolation.

Living into my 72nd year in this still wonderfully amazing world, I did not expect to experience yet another major medical pandemic.

At two years of age, in 1950, the worldwide polio epidemic afflicted me, marking my life both in surprisingly rewarding ways and in a much less cheerful manner.

So far, praise God, I am fine but the Covid-19 virus knows no barriers of age, race, social class or gender – which is why I fully support the extension of the movement control order (MCO).

Nonetheless, human beings are sociable and connective beings, albeit to varying degrees; some need to party every day, others are quite happy with monthly gatherings or even yearly get-togethers. Not to be able to feel the physical presence of family and friends can be very trying to many of us. Even those odd, solipsistic characters in Kafka’s tales reveal glimpses of a need for the human voice, for a word or two of communication, a reassurance that we are not alone.

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The key issue here is choice since no one likes to be ‘forced’ to live in a certain way. So I do understand what drives some people to break the rules of the MCO, but I certainly won’t encourage this kind of disregard for the safety of others.

Perhaps it will help to rethink what living under the MCO can mean. There will never be a one size fits all in any challenging moment of changes in daily living, so no one can prescribe what works. A lot depends on the individual’s psyche, on what he has been trained to do in his work and other variables.

Many of my friends are or were academics. They are, arguably, used to the ‘monastic’ life of reading, writing and reflection, so the MCO may inflict less pain? Speaking of my long-time friendship with his mother, a professor at a certain university, a young friend (himself now ensconced in academia) says, “Once an academic, always an academic, and so over the years your ties have lasted.”

I wonder though if our ties are not strengthened by those tempting dinners of delicious curries and stimulating conversations experienced in the flesh?

One does not need to be an academic to enjoy a good read during the MCO. How many books bought long ago have you left on your shelves to gather dust, not because you didn’t want to enjoy them? It was simply that life, with its many demands small or large, didn’t leave you with any time to enjoy a quiet read.

I just took down from my shelf a wonderful volume of essays, The Beacon Book Of Essays by Contemporary American Women, given to me by the editor way back in 1997 and am savouring the exquisite style of great essayists. When you read that long-neglected book, you are also giving yourself a ‘journey’ back in time because you remember how or why you acquired it.

Indeed, the MCO may allow you the respite to remember good times and draw delight from them. One of the blessings given to human beings is the ability to savour past joys once again in remembering, and you don’t have to be a Marcel Proust to do so – but a little dessert, maybe not a petit madeleine but a nonya kueh, can help? After all, we can still get these treats when we go out to buy our necessities.

Memories of conviviality shared with family and friends over delicious meals can rekindle hope, which is “ medicine” we all need to boost our immune system since the mind-body symbiosis is so vital to good health.

In this time of the MCO, some have also renewed their interests in hobbles once put aside. My cousin is growing hydroponic vegetables on his small balcony successfully, as his WhatsApps photos show. I have taken up sketching once again with child-like delight. Others, like a well-known political scientist friend, has tried his hand at making kimchi. Who knows what dormant talents we have? Now under MCO, it is time to explore.

“You senanglah (easy for you). People can’t even makan (eat). Got no money. You can baca (read), lukis (draw). People no electric even,” I hear someone protest.

How true, the MCO affects us differently according to social class. I read of how a family had to sustain themselves on crackers and sugar water until help came from the community. Food banks in the US and elsewhere are running out of essentials because of the exponential rise in the number of people needing help. Yes, I have been too cheery, too like a Hallmark card in narrowing my vision of living under the MCO to my own lifestyle and needs.

When I wrote about the joy of remembering, I had forgotten that memories can also come back as ungovernable will o’ the wisps, flitting in and out of the crannies of the mind, bringing dark thoughts and melancholic moods.

I know of a depressed person for whom the MCO may add to night terror as she feels all adrift with no relative or friend to call on for help since she had isolated herself for years. What dark thoughts come back to her now? Indeed, what dark thoughts may come back to each of us now under the MCO if we allow them to?

Another elderly lady, whose severe osteoporosis (even more serious than mine) makes it hard for her to walk much, depends on a kind neighbour to take the ordered lunches from the guardhouse of her condo complex. Food delivery personnel aren’t allowed to come up to our apartment doors under the MCO.

What about our guards, our cleaners who ensure that our surroundings are as safe and hygienic as humanly possible, even under the MCO? Fortunately, the management committee of our condo complex supplies guards, cleaners, gardeners and technicians with masks and sanitisers as well as soap for hand-washing.

Elsewhere, such essential service personnel may not be so fortunate. Just yesterday morning as I looked out of my window, I watch the garbage truck on its regular round to collect our garbage. Both the driver and the men picking up the waste of more affluent living had no masks on or gloves!

“Aiyoh, why they never protect their workers,” said a concerned neighbour.

“Ya lor,” I answered, “if they don’t work, how ah? We all die-lah. Not bad smell only, viruses and bacteria ah?”

We have decided to give hand soap in easy-to-use bottles, a few treats of Milo packets and biscuits to these valiant folk who are on the front line as much as doctors and medical personnel.

There should be legislation making it mandatory for all employers to provide protective gear. This should operate in other services than the medical.

Supermarkets, convenience stores and so on do expose their employees to the danger of Covid-19 since these employees serve many people in the course of a day. Some responsible outlets have seen to this, perhaps not entirely out of civic responsibility but because their customers feel safer with these preventive measures in place. We owe these brave people, who still serve us under the MCO, a genuine concern for their safety.

Living under the MCO strains nerves and muscles as we hunker down, trying to keep mental and physical health intact. Instead of complaining, let us accept that we need the MCO and other social distancing measures for our own safety and the safety of medical personnel who risk their lives for us.

A friend, whose daughter is a houseman in the UK, just sent me a link to the Guardian on a young NHS doctor just eight months into her work as a houseman, which made me cry. Dr Rosie Hughes has had to hold the hands of patients dying alone; she needed to inform relatives on deaths while trying to rein in her own emotions. Worse, she may have to decide on who qualifies for a ventilator. No one so young, indeed no one at any age, should have to face such excruciatingly painful decisions.

When she herself felt unwell, losing her sense of smell and taste, it was difficult, even though she is a doctor, to get tested. We simply do not know how hard it can be even for medical personnel to get these expensive tests. When she tested positive and was told to stay at home, there is the guilt of putting an extra burden on colleagues and a growing fear that she may infect her housemates. Above all, she has to call on fresh reserves of courage and dedication when she recovers and returns to work knowing that protective gear is in short supply.

When Covid-19 is tamed, there will be a generation of doctors and other frontliners who will need to deal mentally and emotionally with the horror they had experienced. Physicians, nurses and so on, will need psychological healing.

Living under the MCO gives us more time for prayer whichever faith we follow – or, if you are not religious, just think good thoughts of frontliners. Perhaps send these to them via WhatsApp or other recognised and legitimate links.

Before the Covid-19 invasion, some of us may have laughed off small gestures of kindness as sentimental and inconsequential. But today, are these small acts merely a kind of Hallmark card mawkishness?

Quite the contrary. Every bit of caring counts when we are faced with such a desperate and dire medical crisis. Kindness, empathy, patience, resilience and hope will see us through. Cynicism has no place when we see mass graves (normally associated with war) being dug in some parts of the world for many Covid-19 patients who died alone.

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My opinion is that progressives everywhere should push for some form of UBI (Universal Basic Income) in their respective countries. The richer the country, the higher the regular payouts. Brazil’s Bolsa Familia was a success during the time of President Lula da Silva. UBI especially for the desperately poor. Those of us who are more fortunate can contribute to the “freeware” economy i.e. create things that are useful and distribute them for free, or the “shareware” economy i.e. create useful things and ask for voluntary payments (up to the user to pay whatever he or she wants to). We already have lots of things free (legally) on the Internet. Especially true of things that can be digitised or distributed electronically.

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Time to Learn – a reflection on Movement Control Order (MCO)

• Post author: admin
• Post published: 6 April 2020
• Post category: Uncategorized

   During this recent outbreak of the novel coronavirus, Covid-19, the government has issued a MCO (Movement Control Order) which is an order that restricts all movement. We as the citizens of Malaysia have to stay at home and are not allowed to go outside other than to buy groceries. This is also happening all over the world, as an attempt to stop the spread of the Covid-19.

   Due to this MCO, I, as a student, am not allowed to go to school or my music lessons. Even though I am a Catholic, I am not allowed to go to church. However, I still go for online Masses every weekend. I believe that in this time of panic, we should remain steadfast and not give up on our beliefs or our religion.

   As Christians, we believe that we should remain loyal and kind to others, and love our family members and friends. Even throughout this movement control, I stay in contact with my friends to see how they are doing.

   Although this MCO encompasses social distancing, it is an opportunity to bond and spend time with my family. Usually during a normal day, I barely get time to spend time with my family. I’ve always been so busy with my school and music and other activities that I don’t have much time with my family. Although I still have a lot of homework, I still get more time with my family.

   During the MCO, I have had a lot of time to think about myself and the kind of person that I want to be. I have been told that I have quite a few bad qualities that I have to change. So, throughout this MCO, I will work hard to become a better and correct the qualities that I should change, for example, procrastination.

   Thanks to this movement restriction, I have been able to think about the things that really matter, not materialistic things, but things that will actually make an impact in my life. I have learnt to be grateful. I have learnt to be grateful for the things that I usually complain about, like my brother being talkative. Now I’m grateful to have someone to talk to. I am also grateful and proud to be a Christian. I’m thankful to have something to believe in. although here in Malaysia, the cases aren’t as bad as other more major countries. I am worried. I know that out there in other countries such as Italy and America, people are dying like flies. I’m just worried that people I know will go. I know that they are going to a better place but I feel sorry for their families.

   I know that this Covid-19 pandemic is a growing problem. That’s why the government decided to give out this movement control order. But despite the circumstances, I still believe that we should make the most out of this rest period. This pandemic isn’t going to go away just like that. Even after this movement control order is over, even after a year, this coronavirus is still going to be here. That is the reality of the situation.

   In conclusion, I believe that we should take this time to bond with our family, we should stand strong and firm in our beliefs and most importantly, we should be grateful for all the little things in our life.

• Abigail Kiim

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We’ve got a situation here – a reflection on Movement Control Order (MCO)

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What do you miss most during these days of MCO?

MY usual morning rituals involve waking up at around 7am, neither too early nor too late. I could never sleep beyond 8am unless I overindulged the night before, which isn’t often nowadays. This is after a normal bedtime between 11pm and 1.30am.

After the normal routine stuff everyone attends to in the bathroom, shower, and toilet; I go downstairs and open up the sliding doors, windows, put the kettle on, and make breakfast. I have a simple breakfast of two soft boiled kampung eggs, a big cup of black coffee, and wholemeal bread with butter. I read the morning papers, The Borneo Post, and scroll through my messages, texts, and posts on my WhatsApp chat groups, emails, and Facebook. I am not active on WeChat, Telegram, Instagram, Messenger, and Twitter, although I have accounts there too. I attend to the usual personal and urgent ones; KIV the rest for later.

On a normal day, I would be on the road by around 9.30am. Since March 18, when the MCO started, it means that at around that time I start going through my emails, WhatsApp groups, and Facebook, and respond to what needs my attention; and then I continue to proceed to catch up on the latest news, editorials, views, and special features that interest me.

I would then share by forwarding whatever had caught my interest and what I personally feel would interest others – to my usual external links – on my personal Facebook newsfeed/timeline would go all those items that are more personal; to my public forum for those which I feel would interest the world at large; and WhatsApp groups for mixed stuff.

By then it would usually be noon or what is lunch time for most. I normally skip lunch, but if hunger pangs hit me I’ll have a quick snack – under MCO, whatever is convenient, a ham and cheese sandwich, a bowl of soup and bread, or something quick.

Then I’d read a book or some lengthy articles on online news portals while listening to music in the background. I’d have a nap right after …

The evenings are easier as one could make dinners go on longer for family bonding time. There’s no rush to go anywhere else after. The nights are easier too, so many movies and TV series to watch on the telly; so much music to listen to; so many books and magazines to read and browse. For now at least, you actually do have time on your hands!

It would be interesting to know what you all do and what you miss most?

For those who exercise every morning, especially if you go outdoors to a specific location; be it for a jog, a brisk walk, some taichi, line-dance, or just the gym, I’m sure it’s a huge disruption to your lives. Firstly by now, Day 17 – you should be feeling really restless, unfit, and, most of all, slightly unsettled. Unless you are like me, someone who seldom exercises other than walking from the car park to the shops and the occasional longer walks – I too feel like my leg muscles are slowly atrophying away as I can actually feel my heartbeats slowing down! Or you can just blame the hypochondriac in me!

I admire those family members and friends who have remained cheery and are keeping themselves busy with projects and stuff aplenty to do. I see friends posting about new dishes they’ve managed to rustle up in the kitchens, baking away appetising looking goodies, sharing recipes, and happily eating away! That’s the spirit.

Talking about spirits, I have seen photos of friends who organised and arranged for cyber-conferencing their Happy Hours, using Google, Skype, or Zoom to share a pre-arranged time to drink together in a group; all that’s missing from such affairs are their physical selves – their spirit and souls are there – as they raise their glass of beer, wine, or spirit to each other! Cheers, yam seng, kempai!

What do I miss most myself?

First of all, I do miss the family time; the visits I get or going to my grandson’s to play with him and going out together. I also miss the breakfast dates with the usual Thursday gang (we’ve done it for more than three years!), other irregular meal dates for lunch or dinners with other friends too. I miss the camaraderie time with former work colleagues and the happy hours we used to have at various drinking holes with two or three other groups of good friends.

I also miss the regular shopping excursions – to the wet markets for meat, vegetables and seafood; the dry stores and supermarkets for other provisions. Bumping ever so often into other family and friends doing the same rounds – at our age stuff like this are no longer considered ‘chores’ but rather fun things to do!

Having seen and read about what’s going on around us all, I take my hat off,  salute, and say bravo to other family and friends who are taking all this in good stead, spending their time to offer their personal help and assistance, and indeed their time and effort to lessen the load and to help those in need – of food, face masks, sanitiser, and medical care – the lonely, aged, abject poor, and homeless man in the street.

I would specifically mention a few whom I know on a personal basis – the Rt Revd Bishop Datuk Danald Jute of the Anglican Church; Datuk Richard LC Wee of the Federation of Chinese Chambers; the many NGOs out there who have silently and earnestly gone about doing their work on the ground – most without any publicity.

I thought it most abhorrent when I saw postings of politicians who had put on their personal stickers onto bags of rice and other donated foodstuff as they are being distributed to the poor and needy in the rural areas. Now is not the time for politicking!

There’s another 10 days left to go – and who knows if the MCO would actually be lifted by April 14? What if it’s extended again?

Only God and the Ministry of Health would know.

In the meantime, please keep safe, stay home, be healthy, and do pray to God.

Comments can reach the writer via [email protected] .

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LIBRARY OF ARTICLES: : Responsibility and Chores :

Part i – benefits of chores, the chore conflict.

“Just wait a minute. I promise – I’ll do it later.” “Aw Mom, do I have to??” “Angie doesn’t have to do this; why do I have to?”

How many times have you heard these refrains or something similar when you request your children to do a chore around the house? Chances are it has been often.

Children can be pros at procrastination, excuses, resistance and refusal when it comes to chores. This causes much concern among parents and conflict between children and their parents.

From the Child’s Point of View

Why children resist doing chores.

Part of the explanation rests with the very nature of children.

Young children and teens are:

lacking in judgment. Most young children have no idea how much work is involved with the running of a household.

impulsive. They want what they want when they want it. Working at activities that are not immediately gratifying to them is not inherently on their agenda.

self-absorbed and concerned mainly about themselves and their own needs. They do not naturally consider the needs and expectations of others.

What Is Needed to be Motivated

Doing chores willingly requires:

• mature judgment,
• less impulsivity,
• and more awareness of others’ perspectives and needs.

Children are not born with these traits; they develop gradually as children grow and mature.

Part of your job as parents is to socialize your children during the 18 or 20 years that they live with you by helping them to develop these mature qualities. Therefore, it should not be a surprise, and perhaps you should accept and expect, that they resist helping at home.

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Is it Worth the Struggle?

Insisting that chores be completed can feel like a never-ending battle. Because it can feel like you are constantly reminding, nagging, or imposing consequences just to get your children to follow through, you may decide to let chores slide. It becomes easier in the short run to do the jobs yourself.

Parents may be reluctant to engage in continuous struggles for fear of damaging their relationship with their children.

They may feel guilty asking their children to help; after all, children are so busy with all the other demands on them from school, peers and extra-curricular activities that you may be reluctant to add to the pressures.

Parents may believe their little ones are too young to take on responsibilities, not realizing how capable their youngsters actually can be.

The Benefits of Chores

The research.

Even though it is more difficult at the time to persist in having children do chores, kids benefit from the experience.  

Research indicates that those children who do have a set of chores have higher self-esteem, are more responsible, and are better able to deal with frustration and delay gratification, all of which contribute to greater success in school.

  Furthermore, research by Marty Rossman* shows that involving children in household tasks at an early age can have a positive impact later in life. In fact, says Rossman, “the best predictor of young adults’ success in their mid-20’s was that they participated in household tasks when they were three or four.”  

Life Skills

Doing chores gives a child the opportunity to give back to their parents for all you do for them. Kids begin to see themselves as important contributors to the family. They feel a connection to the family.

Holding them accountable for their chores can increase a sense of themselves as responsible and actually make them more responsible . Children will feel more capable for having met their obligations and completed their tasks.

One of the most frequently sited causes of over-indulgence stems from parents doing too much for their children and not expecting enough of them. Not being taught the skills of everyday living can limit children’s ability to function at age appropriate levels.

For example:

5-year-old Sara goes to kindergarten and is one of the few students who has no idea how to put on and button her own coat. Sam, age 7, goes to a friend’s house for dinner but does not know how to pour juice for himself. Fast forward to Beth who at age 18 goes away to college not knowing how to do her own laundry.

By expecting children to complete self-care tasks and to help with household chores, parents equip children with the skills to function independently in the outside world.

With only so many hours in a day, parents need to help children decide how to spend their time and to determine what is most important.

• Self-Esteem

If you let children off the hook for chores because they have too much schoolwork or need to practice a sport, then you are saying, intentionally or not, that their academic or athletic skills are most important.

And if your children fail a test or fail to block the winning shot, then they have failed at what you deem to be most important. They do not have other pillars of competency upon which to rely.

By completing household tasks, they may not always be the star student or athlete, but they will know that they can contribute to the family, begin to take care of themselves, and learn skills that they will need as an adult.

Setting the Tone

Role modeling.

In addition to being steadfast in the belief that it is important to have children complete chores, your attitudes can help set the tone that will increase possible cooperation in your household. You can consider how you look at your “chores” – you are your children’s most important role model.

You can send the message that chores are a bore and something to be avoided at all costs.

Conversely, you can send the message that these are the tasks that need to be completed in order for your household to run smoothly and that everyone in the family is encouraged and expected to participate.

Encouraging Participation

Young children naturally want to be a part of the family and want to help. Ideally, you will encourage their participation (even if it takes more work on your part in the short run).

By the age of three, youngsters can be assigned their own tasks, for which they are responsible, such as pulling up the sheets on their bed or placing the napkins on the table or sorting the laundry.

The size of the task does not matter; the responsibility associated with it does.

Assigning Chores

For those parents who did not begin a chore regimen when their kids were little, you can still start a plan now. You can take some time to think about what tasks you need help with, what life skills your children need to learn, and what are each child’s interests and abilities.  

Consider these Questions

What chores do you want completed in your home?

Are the ones already selected the best fit for each of your children and ones that are most meaningful to the running of your household?

Are there life skills that a particular child needs to learn?

Do you want to tie allowance to chore completion?

Ask for Input

As you contemplate these decisions, you can ask your children for their input. Children are more cooperative when they have a say. Also, brainstorm ideas for overcoming any obstacles you have faced in the past, such as children not following through, arguing, or not doing a thorough job.

Hold Family Meetings

Many parents hold a family meeting to discuss chores and when and how they will be starting, revising, or re-instating them. Such times together can build morale, improve relationships, and facilitate creative problem solving.

Update your Chore Plan

Some families use birthdays as natural markers for examining what responsibilities as well as what privileges their children are receiving.  

Other, naturally occurring breaks that lend themselves to instituting or revisiting a chore plan include the beginning or end of the school year or returning from vacations.  

One question that parents frequently ask is whether allowance should be tied to the completion of chores. This is a personal call, with experts weighing in on both sides.  

Option 1 – Do Chores to Earn Allowance

Some parents feel quite resentful of handing their children money if the youngsters do not assist with the running of the household.

For these parents, the money is an incentive for a job well done. Just as adults must learn to complete a job satisfactorily in order to be paid, some parents want to instill that same work ethic in their children.

Under these circumstances, parents would want to pay the child an allowance as compensation for a job well done.

Option 2 – Chores and Allowance are Separate

Other parents want their children to help around the house as a contributing member of the family , not because there is money or other external rewards associated with it.

These families believe that it takes a lot of effort for a household to function smoothly and that their children should participate without pay because they are a part of the family.

In addition, some families want their children to learn to be financially responsible and are concerned that if the chores are not satisfactorily completed, then their children will not receive pay and will not have the opportunity to budget or make spending choices.

For either of the above reasons, these families may want to separate chore completion from allowance.

Option 3 – Earn Privileges

One alternative to paying money may be to have children earn privileges for completing their chores .

For example, a teen may earn the right to use the car on the weekends by washing the automobile. A school-age child may earn the privilege to have friends over to play if he throws away the trash and puts away the games after a previous gathering.

Revisiting Allowance

Providing an allowance and under what circumstances is an individual decision, one that parents can revisit and alter during any of the re-evaluation sessions they hold as a family.

Be convinced of the importance of chores in developing your children’s character. If you firmly believe in their value, you will communicate this message to your children and you will be less likely to give in to their delay tactics or resistance.

Consider how you look at your “chores” – you are your children’s most important role model. As such, they will watch you and decide if responsibilities are met with acceptance and grace or with resentment and anger.

Make chores a regular part of the family routine – it is expected that everyone over the age of 3 will be responsible for certain tasks to keep the household functioning.

Decide if allowance will be given for the completion of chores.

Children may not thank you in the short term for giving them chores. This is a case where the goal is not necessarily to make your children happy; rather it is to teach them life skills and a sense of responsibility that will last a lifetime.

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Why kids should do chores at home (and how to get started).

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Happy family man doing chores at home with daughter.

As parents, it is our job to teach our kids financial responsibility and independence. One excellent way to do this is with chores at home. For our family, this is something we’ve been experimenting with a lot recently.

About six years ago, on a random Friday evening, I came home from a long day of work. To my surprise, I saw my 5-year-old daughter vacuuming our kitchen.

I asked my wife what our little one was up to, but she was just as perplexed as I was.

During the previous year, we’d been helping our daughter to do her chores every Saturday morning, but she never had taken the initiative to do them on her own.

After she finished vacuuming, she asked us to leave the kitchen while she put away the silverware. She told us that she wanted it to be a surprise.

We let this cleaning frenzy go on for another 15 minutes before we stopped her and asked, “Why are you doing your chores today?”

She said, “I love you. I want to help the family.”

When those words came out of her mouth, my heart filled with such pride and love. Our little girl understood what it meant to be a part of our family.

We don’t just express our love through words. We also express our love through action.

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Now, were the spoons on top of the forks when she was done? Yes.

Did she vacuum every last Cheerio on the ground? No.

But at 5 years old, we’re not looking for perfection. We’re just looking for her to understand why it’s important to help and how her effort means a lot to us.

Fast forward to today, my daughter is now 11 and I’m happy to report that not only is she still doing her chores, but she’s extremely helpful.

It’s not just cute anymore. The chores she does actually make our lives more relaxing and peaceful.

She knows how to wash, dry and fold her clothes. In addition, she fills the bird feeder, empties the dishwasher, takes the garbage to the street, fills the cat dishes, vacuums the kitchen and so much more.

We’re raising a responsible, family-centric, independent girl. And I’m so proud of her.

And her younger brother is watching her, learning from her and contributing in the same way.

Benefits Of Kids Doing Chores

There are so many benefits of kids doing chores at home. I shared some personal benefits already, but here are some more.

• You are teaching your children that being a part of a family means everyone contributes.
• They learn the importance of teamwork and collaboration (crucial skills for life).
• Eventually, their chore skills get better and better and before you know it, you’re a lot less swamped as a parent.
• While chaos may seem to be the MO for kids, structure is what they crave.

According to the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention , “Structure helps parents and their kids. Kids feel safe and secure because they know what to expect. Parents feel confident because they know how to respond, and they respond the same way each time. Routines and rules help structure the home and make life more predictable.”

Chores At Home Are Falling Out Of Favor

With all the benefits associated with chores for kids, it appears to be falling out of favor in our society.

According to a recent survey by BusyKid , they found that while more than 90% of parents say they did chores as a child , only 66% of them regularly have their own children do chores.

That honestly doesn’t surprise me.

The mindset from parents might be something like this, “Well, I want my kids to have it better than I did when I was a kid. And so they don’t need to do chores.”

This is the wrong mindset in my opinion. And there’s research to back it up.

A 75-year Harvard Grant and Glueck study followed two groups of people: 268 Harvard graduates from the classes of 1939 through 1944, and 465 men who grew up in poor inner-city neighborhoods in Boston.

The study participants were observed for over a 75 year period.

What did they find?

“The researchers found that those who were given chores as adults ended up being more independent, better able to work in collaborative groups, and better able to understand that doing hard work means you’re a valuable member of a community.”

Those are the type of kids I want and those are the types of community members I want as well. Chores are good for kids.

Getting Started With Chores For Kids

Helping your kids learn the importance of contributing to the household responsibilities is a big deal. That’s why it’s important to be in lock step with your spouse on the chore rules and schedule.

It takes teamwork and consistency from both parents to help make this life-changing tradition become a habit for your children.

Here are some of the things to discuss upfront with your spouse:

• What are the chores we feel are appropriate for our child?
• Which chores should we pay for and which ones should we not pay for?
• When is the best time and day to complete these chores?

When we started this whole chore and reward program, my wife and I agreed that our kids would have both “Family Chores” and “Money Chores.”

Family Chores are activities that our kids do as members of the family.

Some of these chores include putting dirty clothes in the hamper, setting the table before dinner, clearing dishes after meals and making the bed.

Money Chores are contributions that go above and beyond typical responsibilities.

Our 5-year-old would receive $1 for each of her money chores.

Some of those activities where she got cash included putting away the silverware, emptying the trash receptacles around the house and putting away her laundry (after Mom and Dad folded it).

We found that Saturday morning was the best time to complete the Money Chores with our kids.

In the years that followed, we all agreed that after school would be a better time so the weekends could be set for total relaxation. I’d suggest doing whatever works for your family.

We do our best to stay consistent with a schedule so it becomes the normal way of life for our kids. When our kids get home from school, they know they have to complete their chores. They are used to it at this point.

My now 11-year-old daughter doesn’t require many reminders at all anymore. My 8-year-old son requires a bit more encouragement, but he’s gotten so much more responsible over the last year. Watching his older sister helps a lot.

Do we miss a couple of days here and there? Absolutely.

But overall, the regular schedule has helped our kids succeed and truly bring a sense of harmony to our home.

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Essay on Household Chores

Students are often asked to write an essay on Household Chores in their schools and colleges. And if you’re also looking for the same, we have created 100-word, 250-word, and 500-word essays on the topic.

Let’s take a look…

100 Words Essay on Household Chores

Introduction to household chores.

Household chores are tasks we do to keep our homes clean and organized. These tasks include cleaning, cooking, washing clothes, and many more. Everyone in the family can help with these tasks. Doing chores is important because it teaches responsibility and helps keep our homes nice and tidy.

Types of Household Chores

There are many types of household chores. Some chores, like dusting and sweeping, are done to keep the house clean. Others, like cooking and washing dishes, are done to prepare meals. We also do chores like laundry and taking out the trash.

Benefits of Doing Chores

Doing chores has many benefits. It teaches us how to take care of our things. It also helps us learn to work as a team when we do chores with others. Plus, doing chores can make us feel good because we are helping our family.

In conclusion, household chores are important tasks that help keep our homes clean and organized. Doing these chores can teach us many valuable skills, like responsibility and teamwork. So, let’s all do our part in keeping our homes clean!

250 Words Essay on Household Chores

What are household chores, importance of household chores.

Household chores are very important. They help us keep our homes clean and safe. A clean home is healthy and comfortable to live in. Chores also teach us responsibility and discipline. When we complete our chores, we learn to take care of our things and spaces.

Sharing Chores in a Family

In a family, everyone should help with chores. This way, the work is not too much for one person. Parents can do the harder tasks, while children can help with simpler ones. For example, children can help set the table or tidy up their toys.

Learning New Skills

Doing chores can also teach us new skills. For example, cooking can teach us about different foods and how to prepare them. Laundry can teach us how to take care of our clothes so they last longer.

The Joy of Completing Chores

Even though chores can sometimes feel boring, there is joy in completing them. When we finish a task, we can feel proud of our work. We can see the results immediately, like a clean room or a cooked meal.

In conclusion, household chores are an important part of our daily lives. They keep our homes clean, teach us responsibility and new skills, and can even bring us joy.

500 Words Essay on Household Chores

Introduction.

There are many types of household chores. Cleaning chores involve sweeping and mopping the floors, dusting furniture, and cleaning windows. Kitchen chores include cooking, washing dishes, and cleaning the kitchen. Laundry chores involve washing, drying, and folding clothes. Outdoor chores might include gardening, mowing the lawn, or washing the car. Each chore has its importance and helps in keeping the house clean and organized.

Benefits of Household Chores

Doing household chores has many benefits. First, it helps to keep our surroundings clean and hygienic, which is good for our health. Second, it teaches us responsibility and discipline as we need to complete these tasks regularly. Third, chores can be a great way to exercise and stay fit. For example, sweeping the floor or mowing the lawn can be a good workout. Lastly, doing chores can also help us to learn new skills like cooking or gardening, which can be useful in our life.

Sharing Household Chores

Chores as a learning experience.

Doing household chores can be a great learning experience, especially for children. It teaches them the importance of cleanliness and hygiene. It also instills a sense of responsibility and discipline in them. They learn to manage their time effectively as they need to balance their chores and other activities like studies and play. Moreover, they learn practical skills like cooking, cleaning, and gardening which are essential life skills.

In conclusion, household chores are an integral part of our daily life. They help in maintaining cleanliness and order in our homes. They teach us valuable lessons about responsibility and teamwork. Moreover, they provide us with an opportunity to learn new skills. So, instead of seeing them as a burden, we should embrace them as a part of our routine and contribute our bit in making our homes a better place to live in.

If you’re looking for more, here are essays on other interesting topics:

Apart from these, you can look at all the essays by clicking here .

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IMPACT AND CHALLENGES TOWARDS EMPLOYEES WORK FROM HOME DURING COVID-19 (MCO) PERIOD

2020, 2nd International Conference on Economy, Education, Engineering, Business, Technology and Social Sciences

Malaysian citizens were in panic due to spreading of covid-19 disease (corona virus) since December 2019. The Malaysian Prime Minister has enforced a movement control order (MCO) on 18th March 2020 as a mitigation effort to reduce community spread and the overburdening of the country's health system. In obeying MCO order, majority of the Malaysian citizens was requested to stay indoor in avoiding outside activities. Few industries in Malaysia were requested to work from home (WFH) such as telecommunication, human resource, academic, insurance, marketing sectors and many more. Generally, work from home can provide advantages and disadvantages to the workers especially during a severe pandemic situation. Malaysian publics are in varied of feelings and emotions due to covid-19 impact. On top of this, they are requested to comply job duties from home. Thus, this study is mainly to examine the impact of working from home and to identify the challenges faced by employees those working from home. The result showed that, working from home give positive impact on saving cost and time, productivity, finished task on time and work life balance.

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9 reasons why household chores are important for children

Annalena bischoff.

• March 15, 2023

Photo by cottonbro studio for Pexels

When it comes to taking care of the household , one person is just not enough. Family life is not only about supporting each other emotionally, a division of work does also impact the relationship between parents and their children. Especially if they know, everyone works as a team .

Setting the table, emptying the dishwasher, folding clothes from the day before – just little tasks throughout the day. Looking at them separately, they are all quickly finished while summing up the time needed for each steals us a lot of free time. Especially when we are busy all day long: preparing breakfast for the morning, getting ready for work, parents bringing the children to kindergarten and school, work. After-work hours do not contain a lot of relaxing when there are all the chores we need to do, without any family members helping out.

There are lots of stressor we face during the day. Home should be the place where we should take time for ourselves and leave all the duties of the day behind us. It sounds like a peaceful place: changing into the jogging pants, warm and comfortable moments on the couch, a nice dinner and a long bath.

“Home is a place blessed, where you and your family can be secure, have all you need, and share your sadness and happiness. Where you can help each other as a family. It does not matter how big or small.” – Honey

Helping each other as a family also means dividing the work to make sure home stays the place to feel comfortable. The work cannot be done by one single person, that is why it is important to include children in household work. Here are 9 benefits of sharing chores with your children:

1. There is work for every age group

The list of chores that need to be done in the household is long. It can also vary depending on the age of the children in your household as well as the cirumstances, e.g. if you have guests over for a dinner night, you will need more time in the kitchen to prepare the food. Even though children of different age groups all have different skills, everyone can take part of the household. For toddlers, for example, it starts with putting away the toys they have just played with to teach them to clean up after themselves. School kids have more capabilities of helping out at home. They can assist in preparing meals, setting the table and bringing the garbage to the bins. Teenagers can take even more responsibilities and might help to clean the house, cook light meals and empty the dishwasher. Annie Stuart created a list of chores she recommends for different age groups. Have a look on what she suggests!

2. Children learn how to take responsibilities

Oftentimes, parents believe that it is still too early to involve their children in chores because they are just children and need to enjoy being young as long as they possibly can. But children will be urged to take responsibilities in different stages of their lives: in kindergarten they will have to clean up after themselves, in school they will have to do their homework and work in groups with their class mates, at some point they will move out and do everything on their own. Step by step parents can assist their children in managing these responsibilities by teaching them how to do things at home. Chores are often one of the first responsibilities children have, they are a great way of developing skills for the future.

3. Children learn realistic work from a young age on

Giving children the feeling of life being too easy only works as long as they live with their parents. Young adults move out quicker than most parents wish. If children never did anything in the household, it is a challenge to take care of oneself and it can be frustrating for the grown-up to learn all these skills. Involving your child from a young age on gives them a feeling of how much work there is in a household. More important, assigning them specific chores within their childhood shows children the reality of work within their home. Growing up in a world without responsibilities only works as long as children live with their parents. At some point they will end up taking care of themselves.

4. It gives them a feeling of being competent and responsible

With every responsibility a child has either in school groups or helping out in the household, it learns how to handle little challenges that will come up regularly. “Chores teach children how to do tasks that they will need throughout their lives — like doing laundry and the dishes. And they teach skills that will benefit them in the classroom and on the sports field, such as how to work together and be a part of a team,” clinical psychologist Caroline Mendel tells author Christina Frank for the Child Mind Institute . Starting with small responsibilities like doing their own bed or setting the table for dinner shows the child that his or her help is necessary for the household to be organised.

5. Children are challenged and feel like they achieved something when finishing their chores

Parents often struggle with their children not wanting to do their chores. Therefore they look for expert advises on how to motivate their child. One major issue is that many children see household tasks like tidying up their room, making their bed, emptying the dishwasher and bringing their dirty laundry down to the laundry basket as duties and obligations. For them, there is always the option: chores or something fun. Who would not decide for something that cheers them up? Instead of forbidding the exciting parts, many advices are to set certain time limits until when the chores should be done without any consequences. But even if the child did his or her task for the day, it should be appreciated by the parents as well to give their child the feeling of achieving something positive. Praising the child gives them a boost in self-confidence, which connects the ‘annoying’ work with a positive feeling they strive for in the future. Researchers of a study in the United States have found a positive effect of frequent chores for elementary school children on their life satisfaction as well as self-competence.

6. It can improve the children’s mental health

The following Kids at home report illustrates how chores can be therapeutic, also for children. It is not only about keeping the children busy. Pediatric Dr. Anna Groebe explains the impact of household chores on children’s mental health:

7. It makes family life easier because divided work reduces stress

According to therapist Jody Baumstein household tasks should be divided among family members, including children. “If only one or two members of the family are doing all the chores, it can lead to feeling overwhelmed and possibly frustrated with others. By splitting up chores, you’re sharing responsibility amongst the family, which means that everyone can have more time for fun and connection.” Taking care of keeping the home clean together leads to less fights and less stressed parents.

8. Shared work improves family relationships because every family member is part of the team

Chores are often associated with lonely boredom. Actually, they should be more fun because dividing tasks also means developing skills of working in a team . Thinking about sports, who does not enjoy playing soccer more while being outside with the best friends, kicking the ball around rather than kicking it all alone in the garden at home? Therefore it is important to show your children that they are not the only one’s who are doing work they might not enjoy. Every member of the family has their tasks they take care of. If one member does not do their part, the target will never be reached. A good advice of team management is speaking about the chores all together and creating a list of which chores everyone has to do for the following week. It also gives the child the opportunity to pick their favorite work rather than doing something he or she does not like.

9. Children learn to appreciate the work their parents do at home

When children know how much time it costs to do household tasks, they are more likely to appreciate the times their parents do everything themselves. And they might suggest some chores they would take care of. Especially because home is the place for the whole family, so everyone should take part in keeping it tidied up. In order to ensure children understand the value of their work, it is important to communicate clearly, assign them age-appropriate chores but also recognize the work they do. Some parents reward their children by paying them for the work they do. Joanna Fortune , child psychotherapist, supports this method but still finds: some chores must be done without involving money. Just for the learning effect.

To make household work more entertaining for your toddlers, here is a song to keep them in motion when cleaning up their toys. It is often used in pre-schools and gives children the sign: it’s clean-up time.

Motivation is the key for chores because it makes the work feel lighter and even a little fun. Teenagers do not tend to enjoy children’s songs that much. Here is a playlist to entertain the one’s who do not find their motivation for household work easily:

Involving children in household chores is beneficial for parents, since they aren’t buried under a pile of work but also for children because they learn important skills such as independency, autonomy, time management and experience little successes with every task they finish. It is not an obligation but little responsibilities can prepare children for their future as a grown-up and give them a feeling of knowing how to take care of themselves. But the most important is to keep in mind that it is not only the parents’ job to manage the household, there is a task for every member of the family.

• Tags: children , chores , family , Help , household , learn , mental health , Parents , responsibility

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Very interesting choice of topic and great article!

Thank you Alessia!

Dear Annalena, Thank you so much for all the information on this important topic – good job!

kind regards Schumiki

Thank you very much, Anna. I appreciate your opinion!

Very interesting topic and article!

Thank you so much! Let me know in the poll, which age group you find most suitable to start involving children

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Teaching and Learning during MCO Period: Challenges and Opportunities

• May 10, 2020

As the first Movement Control Order (MCO) coincided with the school holiday, to many of the school students, it was the most unexpected but most welcomed news as it was going to be a long school holiday. The original one week holiday had then turned into a so-called ‘prolonged’ vacation which lasted until 31 March 2020.

Thus, every single day was filled with joy by watching tv programmes, engrossing in PUBG games, making slimes, getting to bed and waking up late, and many others. The same activities went on again and again like the old record playing the same song all day long.

In ensuring the teaching and learning process continues, the Prime Minister, Tan Sri Muhyiddin Muhammad Yassin, has requested the Ministry of Education to implement home-based learning initiatives during the duration of the MCO until schools are safe to be reopened.

Since then, school teachers have started to form online classes using platforms including WhatsApp, Telegram, Google Classroom, Zoom and others. Regardless of which platform they have chosen, the teachers’ main intention is all the same – to support the government’s initiatives, to continue teaching and to always keep track of the progress of their students.

Each day, more and more school notes are posted in the group and homework given to ensure teaching and learning progresses well. Parents are repeatedly reminded not to leave the group as teachers can only communicate with the students through their parents’ phone number.

It was, however, a real heartbreaking seeing some parents leaving the group. “They may have more important business or simply do not want their children to borrow their mobile phones,” according to a netizen.

Only a few students (until this article is written) seem to participate actively by submitting their work, the same students, not even one fifth of the total number of the class. Teachers are seen begging for responses, whilst some even posted on their WhatsApp status expressing their feelings and frustration.

Adjusting to the new normal may not be an easy task but is possible. Teachers have to adapt to new teaching mediums. Many, however, enjoy learning new things such as online teaching, apps, and etc.

Students claimed that it is a bit difficult adjusting to the new normal; i.e. home-based schooling. However, to some it is enjoyable as they are exposed to various online resources such as PowerPoint, YouTube videos, Quizizz and Google Form. Students can feel the closeness and enjoy receiving answers from their teachers about their work entry.

Many parents also look at this from a positive side. They enjoy assisting their children, besides, being able to know the names of the teachers teaching each particular subject. There is always a blessing in disguise.

To all the teachers out there, no matter where they are, we have you in our prayers. Let’s keep fighting this invincible enemy, the COVID-19, together; as united we stand, divided we fall.

Dr. Sazuliana Sanif

Department of English Language and Linguistics

Centre for Language Studies, UTHM

Image Credit*Google

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Top five activity ideas with the family during MCO (Part 1)

By Nur Fairuza Syahira

Family is everything to us. With the movement control order (MCO) ensuring that everyone is home, we now have more time than before with them at home. While the bread-earners continue to work from home, family time is equally as important. 

Many people wonder if they will eventually run out of things to do together and start grinding on each other's nerves. Family time should be fun, not tedious. So here are a few good ideas:

Watching movies together

Watching movies is one of the things that everyone enjoys. A variety of interesting films or shows are readily available on television. What's more fun than watching a movie? That's watching a movie together as a family. 

Providers like Netflix, Iflix, Astro, Dim Sum and other online channels are among the most used today. Spending time with family by watching a movie, while eating ice cream or popcorn, is a great way to strengthen relationships.  

Cooking and baking

Making biscuits and cakes or cooking lunch and dinner can be fun activities for the family. This is the time that you can show your cooking skills in the kitchen or try out new recipes for your whole family. At the same time, you can teach your kids how to cook as well as prioritise healthy menus.     

Playing video games 

Playing video games is very exciting, especially for men. Fathers and sons will be able to bond over the latest games, which can be found online. You won’t feel the clock ticking when playing video games. This will help families from venturing outdoors, which is a good thing during the MCO.

Eating at one table 

Given our busy schedules, families tend to eat apart from each other in these modern times. However, the MCO has allowed the family to eat together finally. Use this time to talk about fun things and share parts of your lives that your siblings or parents miss out when you are with your friends. Eating home-cooked meals together can bring about a harmonious family. 

House cleaning

A clean and tidy home ensures a healthy and cheerful family. With the family all together, maintaining the cleanliness of a home can be more challenging. But on the flip side, more hands make light work. Turn it into a game, see who can clean the rooms the best and the winner gets a prize. For example, an extra helping of ice cream,

Moreover, reorganizing furniture around will provide a new atmosphere and environment for the family. 

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Are We Really More Productive Working from Home?

Data from the pandemic can guide organizations struggling to reimagine the new office..

• By Rebecca Stropoli
• August 18, 2021
• CBR - Economics
• Share This Page

Facebook founder and CEO Mark Zuckerberg isn’t your typical office worker. He was No. 3 on the 2020 Forbes list of the richest Americans, with a net worth of $125 billion, give or take. But there’s at least one thing Zuckerberg has in common with many other workers: he seems to like working from home. In an internal memo, which made its way to the Wall Street Journal , as Facebook announced plans to offer increased flexibility to employees, Zuckerberg explained that he would work remotely for at least half the year.

“Working remotely has given me more space for long-term thinking and helped me spend more time with my family, which has made me happier and more productive at work,” Zuckerberg wrote. He has also said that he expects about half of Facebook’s employees to be fully remote within the next decade.

The coronavirus pandemic continues to rage in many countries, and variants are complicating the picture, but in some parts of the world, including the United States, people are desperate for life to return to normal—everywhere but the office. After more than a year at home, some employees are keen to return to their workplaces and colleagues. Many others are less eager to do so, even quitting their jobs to avoid going back. Somewhere between their bedrooms and kitchens, they have established new models of work-life balance they are loath to give up.

This has left some companies trying to recreate their work policies, determining how best to handle a workforce that in many cases is demanding more flexibility. Some, such as Facebook, Twitter, and Spotify, are leaning into remote work. Others, such as JPMorgan Chase and Goldman Sachs, are reverting to the tried-and-true office environment, calling everyone back in. Goldman’s CEO David Solomon, in February, called working from home an “aberration that we’re going to correct as quickly as possible.” And JPMorgan CEO Jamie Dimon said of exclusively remote work: “It doesn’t work for those who want to hustle. It doesn’t work for spontaneous idea generation. It doesn’t work for culture.”

This pivotal feature of pandemic life has accelerated a long-running debate: What do employers and employees lose and gain through remote work? In which setting—the office or the home—are employees more productive? Some research indicates that working from home can boost productivity and that companies offering more flexibility will be best positioned for success. But this giant, forced experiment has only just begun.

An accelerated debate

A persistent sticking point in this debate has been productivity. Back in 2001, a group of researchers from the Human-Computer Interaction Institute at Carnegie Mellon, led by Robert E. Kraut , wrote that “collaboration at a distance remains substantially harder to accomplish than collaboration when members of a work group are collocated.” Two decades later, this statement remains part of today’s discussion.

However, well before Zoom, which came on the scene in 2011, or even Skype, which launched in 2003, the researchers acknowledged some of the potential benefits of remote work, allowing that “dependence on physical proximity imposes substantial costs as well, and may undercut successful collaboration.” For one, they noted, email, answering machines, and computer bulletin boards could help eliminate the inconvenience of organizing in-person meetings with multiple people at the same time.

Two decades later, remote-work technology is far more developed. Data from the US Bureau of Labor Statistics indicate that, even in pre-pandemic 2019, more than 26 million Americans—approximately 16 percent of the total US workforce—worked remotely on an average day. The Pew Research Center put that pre-pandemic number at 20 percent, and in December 2020 reported that 71 percent of workers whose responsibilities allowed them to work from home were doing so all or most of the time.

The sentiment toward and effectiveness of remote work depend on the industry involved. It makes sense that executives working in and promoting social media are comfortable connecting with others online, while those in industries in which deals are typically closed with handshakes in a conference room, or over drinks at dinner, don’t necessarily feel the same. But data indicate that preferences and productivity are shaped by factors beyond a person’s line of work.

The productivity paradigm

Before the COVID-19 pandemic, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom  was bullish on work-from-home trends. His 2015 study, for one—with James Liang , John Roberts , and Zhichun Jenny Ying , all then at Stanford—finds a 13 percent increase in productivity among remotely working call-center employees at a Chinese travel agency.

But in the early days of the pandemic, Bloom was less optimistic about remote work. “We are home working alongside our kids, in unsuitable spaces, with no choice and no in-office days,” Bloom told a Stanford publication in March 2020. “This will create a productivity disaster for firms.”

To test that thesis, Jose Maria Barrero  of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Bloom, and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis  launched a monthly survey of US workers in May 2020, tracking more than 30,000 workers aged 20–64 who earned at least $20,000 per year in 2019.

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price.

The survey measured the incidence of working from home as the pandemic continued, focusing on how a more permanent shift to remote work might affect not only productivity but also overall employee well-being. It also examined factors including how work from home would affect spending and revenues in major urban centers. In addition to the survey, the researchers drew on informal conversations with dozens of US business executives. They are publishing the results of the survey and related research at wfhresearch.com .

In an analysis of the data collected through March 2021, they find that nearly six out of 10 workers reported being more productive working from home than they expected to be, compared with 14 percent who said they got less done. On average, respondents’ productivity at home was 7 percent higher than they expected. Forty percent of workers reported they were more productive at home during the pandemic than they had been when in the office, and only 15 percent said the opposite was true. The researchers argue that the work-from-home trend is here to stay, and they calculate that these working arrangements will increase overall worker productivity in the US by 5 percent as compared with the pre-pandemic economy.

“Working from home under the pandemic has been far more productive than I or pretty much anyone else predicted,” Bloom says.

No commute, and fewer hours worked

Some workers arguing in favor of flexibility might say they’re more efficient at home away from chatty colleagues and the other distractions of an office, and that may be true. But above all, the increased productivity comes from saving transit time, an effect overlooked by standard productivity calculations. “Three-quarters or more of the productivity gains that we find are coming from a reduction in commuting time,” Davis says. Eliminate commuting as a factor, and the researchers project only a 1 percent productivity boost in the postpandemic work-from-home environment, as compared with before.

It makes sense that standard statistics miss the impact of commutes, Davis explains. Ordinarily, commuting time generally doesn’t shift significantly in the aggregate. But much like rare power outages in Manhattan have made it possible for New Yorkers to suddenly see the nighttime stars, the dramatic work-from-home shift that occurred during the pandemic made it possible to recognize the impact traveling to and from an office had on productivity.

Before the pandemic, US workers were commuting an average of 54 minutes daily, according to Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. In the aggregate, the researchers say, the pandemic-induced shift to remote work meant 62.5 million fewer commuting hours per workday.

People who worked from home spent an average of 35 percent of saved commuting time on their jobs, the researchers find. They devoted the rest to other activities, including household chores, childcare, leisure activities such as watching movies and TV, outdoor exercise, and even second jobs.

Infographic: People want working from home to stick after the pandemic subsides

With widespread lockdowns abruptly forcing businesses to halt nonessential, in-person activity, the COVID-19 pandemic drove a mass social experiment in working from home, according to Jose Maria Barrero  of the Mexico Autonomous Institute of Technology, Stanford’s Nicholas Bloom , and Chicago Booth’s Steven J. Davis . The researchers launched a survey of US workers, starting in May 2020 and continuing in waves for more than a year since, to capture a range of information including workers’ attitudes about their new remote arrangements.

Read more >>

Aside from commuting less, remote workers may also be sleeping more efficiently, another phenomenon that could feed into productivity. On days they worked remotely, people rose about 30 minutes later than on-site workers did, according to pre-pandemic research by Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia  of the US Bureau of Labor Statistics and SUNY Empire’s Victoria Vernon . Both groups worked the same number of hours and slept about the same amount each night, so it’s most likely that “working from home permits a more comfortable personal sleep schedule,” says Vernon. “Teleworkers who spend less time commuting may be happier and less tired, and therefore more productive,” write the researchers, who analyzed BLS data from 2017 to 2018.

While remote employees gained back commuting time during the pandemic, they also worked fewer hours, note Barrero, Bloom, and Davis. Hours on the job averaged about 32 per week, compared with 36 pre-pandemic, although the work time stretched past traditional office hours. “Respondents may devote a few more minutes in the morning to chores and childcare, while still devoting about a third of their old commuting time slot to their primary job. At the end of the day, they might end somewhat early and turn on the TV. They might interrupt TV time to respond to a late afternoon or early evening work request,” the researchers explain.

This interpretation, they write, is consistent with media reports that employees worked longer hours from home during the pandemic but with the added flexibility to interrupt the working day. Yet, according to the survey, this does not have a negative overall effect on productivity, contradicting one outdated stereotype of a remote worker eating bonbons, watching TV, and getting no work done.

Remote-work technology goes mainstream

The widespread implementation of remote-working technology, a defining feature of the pandemic, is another important factor for productivity. This technology will boost work-from-home productivity by 46 percent by the end of the pandemic, relative to the pre-pandemic situation, according to a model developed by Rutgers’s Morris A. Davis , University of North Carolina’s Andra C. Ghent , and University of Wisconsin’s Jesse M. Gregory . “While many home-office technologies have been around for a while, the technologies become much more useful after widespread adoption,” the researchers note.

There are significant costs to leaving the office, Rutgers’s Davis says, pointing to the loss of face-to-face interaction, among other things. “Working at home is always less productive than working at the office. Always,” he said on a June episode of the Freakonomics podcast.

One reason, he says , has to do with the function of cities as business centers. “Cities exist because, we think, the crowding of employment makes everyone more productive,” he explains. “This idea also applies to firms: a firm puts all workers on the same floor of a building, or all in the same suite rather than spread throughout a building, for reasons of efficiency. It is easier to communicate and share ideas with office mates, which leads to more productive outcomes.” While some employees are more productive at home, that’s not the case overall, according to the model, which after calibration “implies that the average high-skill worker is less productive at home than at the office, even postpandemic,” he says.

How remote work could change city centers

What will happen to urban business districts and the cities in which they are located in the age of increasing remote work?

About three-quarters of Fortune 500 CEOs expect to need less office space in the future, according to a May 2021 poll. In Manhattan, the overall office vacancy rate was at a multidecade high of 16 percent in the first quarter of 2021, according to real-estate services firm Cushman & Wakefield.

And yet Davis, Ghent, and Gregory’s model projects that after the pandemic winds down, highly skilled, college-educated workers will spend 30 percent of their time working from home, as opposed to 10 percent in prior times. While physical proximity may be superior, working from home is far more productive than it used to be. Had the pandemic hit in 1990, it would not have produced this rise in relative productivity, per the researchers’ model, because the technology available at the time was not sufficient to support remote work.

A June article in the MIT Technology Review by Stanford’s Erik Brynjolfsson and MIT postdoctoral scholar Georgios Petropoulos corroborates this view. Citing the 5.4 percent increase in US labor productivity in the first quarter of 2021, as reported by the BLS, the researchers attribute at least some of this to the rise of work-from-home technologies. The pandemic, they write, has “compressed a decade’s worth of digital innovation in areas like remote work into less than a year.” The biggest productivity impact of the pandemic will be realized in the longer run, as the work-from-home trend continues, they argue.

Lost ideas, longer hours?

Not all the research supports the idea that remote work increases productivity and decreases the number of hours workers spend on the job. Chicago Booth’s Michael Gibbs  and University of Essex’s Friederike Mengel  and Christoph Siemroth  find contradictory evidence from a study of 10,000 high-skilled workers at a large Asian IT-services company.

The researchers used personnel and analytics data from before and during the coronavirus work-from-home period. The company provided a rich data set for these 10,000 employees, who moved to 100 percent work from home in March 2020 and began returning to the office in late October.

Total hours worked during that time increased by approximately 30 percent, including an 18 percent rise in working beyond normal business hours, the researchers find. At the same time, however, average output—as measured by the company through setting work goals and tracking progress toward them—declined slightly. Time spent on coordination activities and meetings also increased, while uninterrupted work hours shrank. Additionally, employees spent less time networking and had fewer one-on-one meetings with their supervisors, find the researchers, adding that the increase in hours worked and the decline in productivity were more significant for employees with children at home. Weighing output against hours worked, the researchers conclude that productivity decreased by about 20 percent. They estimate that, even after accounting for the loss of commuting time, employees worked about a third of an hour per day more than they did at the office. “Of course, that time was spent in productive work instead of sitting in traffic, which is beneficial,” they acknowledge.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules.

Overall, though, do workers with more flexibility work fewer hours (as Barrero, Bloom, and Davis find) or more (as at the Asian IT-services company)? It could take more data to answer this question. “I suspect that a high fraction of employees of all types, across the globe, value the flexibility, lack of a commute, and other aspects of work from home. This might bias survey respondents toward giving more positive answers to questions about their productivity,” says Gibbs.

The findings of his research do not entirely contradict those of Barrero, Bloom, and Davis, however. For one, Gibbs, Mengel, and Siemroth acknowledge that their study doesn’t necessarily reflect the remote-work model as it might look in postpandemic times, when employees are relieved of the weight of a massive global crisis. “While the average effect of working from home on productivity is negative in our study, this does not rule out that a ‘targeted working from home’ regime might be desirable,” they write.

Additionally, the research data are derived from a single company and may not be representative of the wider economy, although Gibbs notes that the IT company is one that should be able to optimize remote work. Most employees worked on company laptops, “and IT-related industries and occupations are usually at the top of lists of those areas most likely to be able to do WFH effectively.” Thus, he says, the findings may represent a cautionary note that remote work has costs and complexities worth addressing.

As he, Mengel, and Siemroth write, some predictions of work-from-home success may be overly optimistic, “perhaps because professionals engage in many tasks that require collaboration, communication, and innovation, which are more difficult to achieve with virtual, scheduled interactions.”

Attracting top talent

The focus on IT employees’ productivity, however, excludes issues such as worker morale and retention, Booth’s Davis notes. More generally, “the producer has to attract workers . . . and if workers really want to commute less, and they can save time on their end, and employers can figure out some way to accommodate that, they’re going to have more success with workers at a given wage cost.”

Companies that offer more flexibility in work arrangements may have the best chance of attracting top talent at the best price. The data from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis reveal that some workers are willing to take a sizable pay cut in exchange for the opportunity to work remotely two or three days a week. This may give threats from CEOs such as Morgan Stanley’s James Gorman—who said at the company’s US Financials, Payments & CRE conference in June, “If you want to get paid New York rates, you work in New York”—a bit less bite. Meanwhile, Duke PhD student John W. Barry , Cornell’s Murillo Campello , Duke’s John R. Graham , and Chicago Booth’s Yueran Ma  find that companies offering flexibility are the ones most poised to grow.

Working policies may be shaped by employees’ preferences. Some workers still prefer working from the office; others prefer to stay working remotely; many would opt for a hybrid model, with some days in the office and some at home (as Amazon and other companies have introduced). As countries emerge from the pandemic and employers recalibrate, companies could bring back some employees and allow others to work from home. This should ultimately boost productivity, Booth’s Davis says.

Or they could allow some to work from far-flung locales. Harvard’s Prithwiraj Choudhury  has long focused his research on working not just from home but “from anywhere.” This goes beyond the idea of employees working from their living room in the same city in which their company is located—instead, if they want to live across the country, or even in another country, they can do so without any concern about being near headquarters.

Does remote work promote equity?

At many companies, the future will involve remote work and more flexibility than before. That could be good for reducing the earnings gap between men and women—but only to a point.

“In my mind, there’s no question that it has to be a plus, on net,” says Harvard’s Claudia Goldin. Before the pandemic, many women deemphasized their careers when they started families, she says.

Research Choudhury conducted with Harvard PhD student Cirrus Foroughi  and Northeastern University’s Barbara Larson  analyzes a 2012 transition from a work-from-home to a work-from-anywhere model among patent examiners with the United States Patent and Trademark Office. The researchers exploited a natural experiment and estimate that there was a 4.4 percent increase in work output when the examiners transitioned from a work-from-home regime to the work-from-anywhere regime.

“Work from anywhere offers workers geographic flexibility and can help workers relocate to their preferred locations,” Choudhury says. “Workers could gain additional utility by relocating to a cheaper location, moving closer to family, or mitigating frictions around immigration or dual careers.”

He notes as well the potential advantages for companies that allow workers to be located anywhere across the globe. “In addition to benefits to workers and organizations, WFA might also help reverse talent flows from smaller towns to larger cities and from emerging markets,” he says. “This might lead to a more equitable distribution of talent across geographies.”

More data to come

It is still early to draw strong conclusions about the impact of remote work on productivity. People who were sent home to work because of the COVID-19 pandemic may have been more motivated than before to prove they were essential, says Booth’s Ayelet Fishbach, a social psychologist. Additionally, there were fewer distractions from the outside because of the broad shutdowns. “The world helped them stay motivated,” she says, adding that looking at such an atypical year may not tell us as much about the future as performing the same experiment in a typical year would.

Before the pandemic, workers who already knew they performed better in a remote-working lifestyle self-selected into it, if allowed. During the pandemic, shutdowns forced remote work on millions. An experiment that allowed for random selection would likely be more telling. “The work-from-home experience seems to be more positive than what people believed, but we still don’t have great data,” Fishbach says.

Adding to the less optimistic view of a work-from-home future, Booth’s Austan D. Goolsbee says that some long-term trends may challenge remote work. Since the 1980s, as the largest companies have gained market power, corporate profits have risen dramatically while the share of profits going to workers has dropped to record lows. “This divergence between productivity and pay may very well come to pass regarding time,” he told graduating Booth students at their convocation ceremony. Companies may try to claw back time from those who are remote, he says, by expecting employees to work for longer hours or during their off hours.

And author and behavioral scientist Jon Levy argues in the Boston Globe that having some people in the office and others at home runs counter to smooth organizational processes. To this, Bloom offers a potential solution: instead of letting employees pick their own remote workdays, employers should ensure all workers take remote days together and come into the office on the same days. This, he says, could help alleviate the challenges of managing a hybrid team and level the playing field, whereas a looser model could potentially hurt employees who might be more likely to choose working from home (such as mothers with young children) while elevating those who might find it easier to come into the office every day (such as single men).

Gibbs concurs, noting that companies using a hybrid model will have to find ways to make sure employees who should interact will be on campus simultaneously. “Managers may specify that the entire team meets in person every Monday morning, for example,” he says. “R&D groups may need to make sure that researchers are on campus at the same time, to spur unplanned interactions that sometimes lead to new ideas and innovations.”

Sentiments vary by location, industry, and culture. Japanese workers are reportedly still mostly opting to go to the office, even as the government promotes remote work. Among European executives, a whopping 88 percent reportedly disagree with the idea that remote work is as or more productive than working at the office.

Regardless of what research establishes in the long run about productivity, many workers are already demanding flexibility in their schedules. While only about 28 percent of US office workers were back onsite by June 2021, employees who had become used to more flexibility were demanding it remain. A May survey of 1,000 workers by Morning Consult on behalf of Bloomberg News finds that about half of millennial and Gen Z workers, and two-fifths of all workers, would consider quitting if their employers weren’t flexible about work-from-home policies. And additional research from Barrero, Bloom, and Davis finds that four in 10 Americans who currently work from home at least one day a week would look for another job if their employers told them to come back to the office full time. Additionally, most employees would look favorably upon a new job that offered the same pay as their current job along with the option to work from home two to three days a week.

The shift to remote work affects a significant slice of the US workforce. A study by Chicago Booth’s Jonathan Dingel  and Brent Neiman  finds that while the majority of all jobs in the US require appearing in person, more than a third can potentially be performed entirely remotely. Of these jobs, the majority—including many in engineering, computing, law, and finance—pay more than those that cannot be done at home, such as food service, construction, and building-maintenance jobs.

Barrero, Bloom, and Davis project that, postpandemic, Americans overall will work approximately 20 percent of full workdays from home, four times the pre-pandemic level. This would make remote work less an aberration than a new norm. As the pandemic has demonstrated, many workers can be both productive and get dinner started between meetings.

Works Cited

• Jose Maria Barrero, Nicholas Bloom, and Steven J. Davis,  “Why Working from Home Will Stick,”  Working paper, April 2021.
• ———,  “60 Million Fewer Commuting Hours per Day: How Americans Use Time Saved by Working from Home,” Working paper, September 2020.
• ———,  “Let Me Work From Home Or I Will Find Another Job,”  Working paper, July 2021.
• John W. Barry, Murillo Campello, John R. Graham, and Yueran Ma,  “Corporate Flexibility in a Time of Crisis,”  Working paper, February 2021.
• Nicholas Bloom, James Liang, John Roberts, and Zhichun Jenny Ying,  “Does Working from Home Work? Evidence from a Chinese Experiment,”   Quarterly Journal of Economics , October 2015.
• Prithwiraj Choudhury, Cirrus Foroughi, and Barbara Larson,  “Work-from-Anywhere: The Productivity Effects of Geographic Flexibility,”   Strategic Management Journal , forthcoming.
• Morris A. Davis, Andra C. Ghent, and Jesse M. Gregory,  “The Work-at-Home Technology Boon and Its Consequences,”  Working paper, April 2021. 
• Jonathan Dingel and Brent Neiman,  “How Many Jobs Can Be Done at Home?”  White paper, June 2020.
• Allison Dunatchik, Kathleen Gerson, Jennifer Glass, Jerry A. Jacobs, and Haley Stritzel,  “Gender, Parenting, and the Rise of Remote Work during the Pandemic: Implications for Domestic Inequality in the United States,”   Gender & Society , March 2021.
• Michael Gibbs, Friederike Mengel, and Christoph Siemroth,  “Work from Home & Productivity: Evidence from Personnel & Analytics Data on IT Professionals,”  Working paper, May 2021.
• Robert E. Kraut, Susan R. Fussell, Susan E. Brennan, and Jane Siegel, “Understanding Effects of Proximity on Collaboration: Implications for Technologies to Support Remote Collaborative Work,” in  Distributed Work , eds. Pamela J. Hinds and Sara Kiesler, Cambridge: MIT Press, 2002.
• Sabrina Wulff Pabilonia and Victoria Vernon,  “Telework and Time Use in the United States,”  Working paper, May 2020.

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I Created a System to Make Sure My Husband and I Divide Household Duties Fairly. Here’s How It Works

I was just pulling up to the departures gate at LAX, where I was catching an early morning flight to my one-day business meeting up in Seattle, when I got the following text from my husband, Seth: Some guy left his jacket and beer bottle on our lawn.

Weird. Gross. And, more importantly, what am I supposed to do about it from the road?

When I returned home 16 hours later and long after the sun had gone down, I’d forgotten about the text until I pulled into my driveway, and there they were sitting in the dark — some guy’s jacket and beer bottle on our lawn. Seriously? I began to seethe. As I unlocked the front door, I quickly tried to work out why.

I was reminded of the many girlfriends who had described “the text” and its spiritual cousin, “the email forward,” as trigger issues in their marriages — a correspondence comes through to both you and your partner from your child’s school, coach, music teacher, doctor’s office or the DMV, and your partner forwards it to you. The implication: I don’t have time to handle this — it’s on you.

That night, standing in the doorway to our bedroom, I understood that my husband expected me to put down my carry-on, grab a trash bag and a pair of rubber gloves, walk outside, pick up the jacket and beer bottle, throw them into the bag, walk the whole thing to the bin in the alley and return home. When I did just that, I made note of how long it took me to do this: 12 minutes. Of my time. That I’ll never get back. I briefly considered these 12 minutes multiplied by thousands of “this is on you” instances required to get through each of my days and began to understand acutely why so many women are running against the clock from the moment we wake up.

What might not be so clear, because it wasn’t to me that night, is: Why was this on me?

Why domestic work falls to women

The answer came to me 12 minutes later when I returned to our bedroom after cleaning up the mess in the front yard, still wearing rubber gloves: Seth was not valuing my time equally to his.

In my day job, I’m a Harvard-trained lawyer and mediator who works with families. But at my own home, I realized, I wasn’t cutting a very good deal for myself. Like so many women — whether they work outside the home or not — I was picking up more than my fair share of the slack in the running of our household . In heterosexual partnerships, women still do the bulk of childcare and domestic work — the National Survey of Families and Households showed that as recently as 2010, married mothers like myself and many of my friends did about 1.9 times the housework of married fathers .

It turned out that my husband (a good guy and progressive in many aspects of our life together — really!) took on less housework after our kids came along , just as a 2015 study in the Journal of Marriage and Family showed is common. I determined to find out why even men like him assume that domestic responsibilities should be so unevenly stacked. In my interviews and conversations on this topic over the last several years with more than 500 people — women and men in straight and same-sex relationships and from all U.S. Census categories in terms of ethnicity and socioeconomic status — overwhelmingly expressed a related idea that contributes to the same outcome: the notion that men’s time is finite and women’s time is infinite. And while women’s time is known to be treated as less valuable in the workplace (see the ongoing battle to achieve equal pay), according to my research, this mental discrepancy where men’s time is guarded as a finite resource (like diamonds) and women’s time is abundant (like sand) can feel even more stark at home and after kids.

So what’s the solution? In an attempt to make visible all the invisible and often unacknowledged work it takes to run a family, I created a document I proudly called the “Sh-t I Do List” that included every single thing I did day-to-day with a quantifiable time component. Tallying every brain-zapping, time-sucking detail of my domestic responsibilities was no small feat, but when I was finished — with the help of women all over the country who wrote in with their own list items — I’d enumerated and categorized 100 household tasks with 20 subtasks that totaled over 1,000 items of invisible work (from laundry to pet care to meal prep to birthday presents) that kept our happy home running smoothly.

When I sent my master list to Seth one triumphant afternoon, expecting a pat on the back (or at least a little recognition for a job well done), he’d texted me back a single emoji: 🙈.

Not even the courtesy of the full trio. Regardless, I got the message — he didn’t want to see, hear or speak of it.

My husband is a smart, caring guy. So why was it so hard for him to understand and appreciate how much extra work I was doing to benefit our family and the home — and the eventual burnout effect it was likely to have on me? Then it hit me: lists alone don’t work; but systems do.

How I fostered more fairness at home

For more than a decade, I’ve consulted with hundreds of families in my professional life by providing my expertise in organizational-management strategy. What if I applied these strategies in my own house by creating a new system in which every task that benefits our home is not only named and counted but also explicitly defined and specifically assigned?

I began to fantasize about what my life and the lives of all of my friends would look like if — in partnership with our spouses — we brought systematic function to what was currently a sh-t show of family dysfunction. I couldn’t think of a couple out there who wouldn’t benefit from a practical plan of action to optimize productivity and efficiency, as well as a new consciousness and language for thinking and talking about domestic life.

The result is a system I termed Fair Play, a figurative game played with your partner, where each partner holds certain “cards” that correspond to domestic tasks. Here are my four easy-to-follow rules that set you up to play.

Rule #1: All time is created equal.

Both partners need to reframe how you value time, and then commit to the goal of rebalancing the hours that domestic work requires between the two of you. The reality is that many straight couples, the mental load will continue to fall on the female partner as the list-maker/planner/household manager until both recognize that time is a limited commodity. You both only have 24 hours in a day. Only when you both believe that your time is equally valuable will the division of labor shift toward parity in your relationship.

Rule #2: Reclaim your right to be interesting .

When your time and your mind become fully focused on the tasks required to run a household, it’s easy to feel like your personal passions aren’t priorities. Both partners deserve to reclaim or discover the interests that make you each uniquely you , beyond your roles as wonderful parents and partners. And Fair Play requires you both to demand time and mental space to explore this right — and to honor that right for each other.

Rule #3: Start where you are now.

You cannot get to where you want to go without first understanding: Who am I? Who am I really in a relationship with? And what is my specific intention for engaging my partner in renegotiating the household workload? Ask yourself: Am I seeking more acknowledgment of everything I do for us? More efficiency so I can have more time for myself? Less resentment and a greater sense of fairness? When you have a clear sense of what you want, you’re more likely to get it. Start the conversation by laying it all out to your partner.

Rule #4: Establish your values and standards .

Take stock of your domestic ecosystem and choose what you want to do in service of the home based on what’s most valuable to you and your partner. Just because you’re in the habit of doing a task doesn’t mean it’s a task that absolutely needs to be done. Maybe you value cooking a homemade breakfast for your child each morning — or maybe, when you and your partner consider what’s most important to you, you decide you’d rather have a few minutes in bed to check in before you start the day, and fruit and yogurt to-go are perfectly fine. After you and your partner determine what “cards” — tasks that must be done because they hold value to your family — are in play, you must mutually agree on a reasonable standard for how those tasks are handled. It’s not enough for your spouse to say he’ll be in charge of the “baseball” card — he has to pack the sports bag with all the necessary gear and snacks, arrange for pick-up and drop-off from practice, make sure all the games are on the family calendar and then show up on the right field at the right time. The more you invest in unpacking the details, the more you will be rewarded.

It didn’t happen overnight, but starting with Rule #1, attitudes started to shift within our home. After the drunk guy’s jacket incident, my husband began to notice and appreciate that we both have the same number of minutes in a day. (The “All Time Is Created Equal” sign that I posted on the bathroom mirror did help to hammer home the point.) It hasn’t always been easy; a shift in thinking takes deliberate effort. Whenever Seth and I would revert to our old, familiar dialogue like, “I don’t have time… so, can you?” or “I don’t have time either, but I guess this is on me,” I’d attempt to reframe the conversation with words that honor and respect how we each choose to spend our finite time. I finally understood that how I’d spent those particular 12 minutes picking up the drunk guy’s jacket and beer bottle was really irrelevant. I wasn’t interested in keeping a minute-by-minute scorecard with my husband; I simply wanted both of us to begin to value our time equally — and to act accordingly.

From FAIR PLAY by Eve Rodsky, published by G. P. Putnam’s Sons, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Copyright (c) 2019 by by Unicorn Space, LLC.

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