How John Curley ended up wearing dirty underwear for years

All parents want their children to be successful, but according to a recent survey, many are turning away from requiring their kids to do household chores, a responsibility that studies have shown may be more linked to success than piano or Mandarin lessons.

A recent Wall Street Journal article outlined the success kids who do chores find later in life.

Related: Is John Curley’s life lesson brutal?

“Dr. Rossmann analyzed data from a longitudinal study that followed 84 children across four periods in their lives – in preschool, around ages 10 and 15, and in their mid-20s. She found that young adults who began chores at ages 3 and 4 were more likely to have good relationships with family and friends, to achieve academic and early career success and to be self-sufficient, as compared with those who didn’t have chores or who started them as teens.”

The article also laid out ideas on how to frame chores so that your kids see them as a positive.

KIRO Radio’s Tom Tangney said according to this study, he had the wrong idea on at least one front.

“I always thought that allowances should be tied to chores, and this study says they should be separate,” Tom said.

Tom had often questioned his wife giving an allowance to their kids that wasn’t attached to any work being done.

“I thought it taught kids a sense of if you work, you get cash in return. Then it allows you to kind of practice how you deal with your money. If you just get money unconnected to the chores like my wife does, then it feels like well they just get it because they’re alive and they get this free handout.”

But according to the study, a big part of positive motivation for chores is about helping others – doing sort of an altruistic act for the benefit of the whole family.

Growing up, Tom and Curley both had chores around the house. Tom said mowing the lawn as a kid was really done for the family, not himself.

“I had a bunch of brothers and we all had lawn duties. I had to mow the lawn. My brother Joe clipped the hedges. My brother Steve raked. We had all these kinds of individual jobs. But we all knew dang well we didn’t care what the lawn looked liked, it was all for mom and dad.”

Curley also mowed the lawn, and said that job would always get done, but he would neglect some of the chores he was supposed to do for himself.

“My mom, when we hit 12, she cut us all off from her doing our laundry,” said Curley. “But of course, I didn’t like doing my laundry because I realized, hey I could just as easily sneak into my brother’s room and take some of the laundry that he had done.”

Only his brother caught onto this and fessed up just a few years ago that he didn’t keep the clean underwear in the top right drawer like Curley thought.

“He said, ‘You know the extra time I had to take to fold my dirty underwear,'” Curley said. His brother would fold his used laundry just to dupe his brother, telling him, “‘I used to see you sneak in there in the morning and steal my dirty underwear.'”

Curley’s lax attitude seems to second the idea from the study that chores should be tied to something good for the family rather than self-care.

The article also said don’t use chores as punishment and keep the speech positive when it comes to talking about duties. They recommend thanking your child not for helping, but for being a “good helper.”

Curley acknowledged that kind of wise wording worked well on him.

“My dad did those sort of things to me, ‘Hey, where’s my strong boy?’ I’m like I guess that’s me, and I’d do the strong task.”

Setting up a positive association for your kids with work has a lot to do with how you express yourself, Curley said.

“Kids are like sponges, they take this stuff in,” said Curley. “To create a work relationship that kids will actually see work as something beneficial and something to be respected, you’re not supposed to say, ‘I have to go to work.’ You’re supposed to say, ‘I get to go work this morning,’ and you’re not supposed to complain about having a job because kids start to see it as something that comes between them and something they really want.”

Perhaps some extra positive talk about the benefits of clean laundry will help kids avoid Curley’s dirty drawer situation as well.