Sign o’ the times?

A woman I worked with said she spent the whole weekend cleaning her house. She has two children. One is a teen and one is about nine. She shrugged and said she still hasn’t gotten around to hiring a cleaning woman.

I work with another woman who has a cleaning woman come in either every week or once every two weeks. She has three children. The oldest attends college out of state but the other two kids are in high school.

When I was a teen we walked to school every day uphill in the snow and part of our chores were to clean the house and do laundry. Our monthly allowance waxed and waned depending on how well we performed. We usually did a bang up job because the housekeeping gig was our only real source of cash until the summer.

My question is were my parents running a sweatshop of sorts or have some of the boomers lost their damn minds? I don’t care how busy your kids are (and, please, you have some control over that—really), it doesn’t take much to run a dust rag around once a week and vacuum. Cleaning the bathroom? Suck it up, even that doesn’t take a whole lot of time if you do it regularly.

Years ago, I worked with a woman who had a house rule. The rule? The house was clean and picked up by Friday night or no one was allowed to go out on the weekend until the house was clean. Her kids were highly motivated.