The Journal
Age-appropriate chores by age: count the steps, not the years
The chore chart everyone shares can be traced no further back than one parent's free printable of November 2013, and the same ten entries, in the same order, now appear on an NHS advice sheet. This piece gives the usual bands with what each one rests on, then replaces age with something you can test at home: the number of steps a child has to hold in mind without being prompted. It stops at twelve.
Where the standard chore chart came from, and what it cites
The chart most people have seen has six bands: ages 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-11, and 12 and up. The earliest dated version I can find is a free printable published on 13 November 2013 by Jennifer Flanders on her family's website. Her post says parents kept asking what a child might be expected to do at what age: "So to that end, I've created this little free printable chart". It cites no research and does not pretend to.
The same chart turns up under an institution's name. NHS Tayside's children's occupational therapy service has an advice sheet, Age Appropriate Chores for Children, in a PDF created in February 2017. It has the same six bands, and its 6-7 list is the 2013 list item for item, in the same order, with four of the ten reworded: trash becomes rubbish, the toilet paper roll a toilet roll, potatoes or carrots potatoes and carrots, and "Dust mop floors" becomes "Dust/Mop floors", which is a different instruction rather than a different spelling - one tool in the first, two jobs in the second. "Bake cookies" and "Shop for groceries w/list" survive untranslated. The sheet cites nothing either.
That is the provenance as far as it can be traced: a parent's printable, sensible and unreferenced, and a later NHS sheet carrying the same list. Neither says one came from the other; the dates and the identical ordering are all there is. I can find no earlier origin for the bands, and no study behind them.
The only national paediatric body whose bands I could find in writing uses different ones. The American Academy of Pediatrics' parenting site, last updated in February 2024, lists chores for ages 5-7, 8-10 and 11-12, sources them to an AAP parenting book rather than to any research, and does not agree with the printable. I could find no chore-by-age page on nhs.uk itself; the NHS material my searches returned is local, like the Tayside sheet above.
Chores by age: the usual bands, and what each one rests on
This is the chart as it circulates, condensed, in the NHS Tayside sheet's wording: convention, not evidence. Each entry ends with what, if anything, stands behind it.
Ages 2 to 3: put toys in a toy box, put dirty clothes in the laundry basket, throw rubbish away. Rests on: more than any other band. The US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention publishes milestones that "most children (75% or more) can do by a certain age". At 30 months they include following "two-step instructions like 'Put the toy down and close the door'" and "simple routines when told, like helping to pick up toys". Every job in this band is one or two steps, done when told.
Ages 4 to 5: feed pets, make the bed, tidy the bedroom, clear the kitchen table. Rests on: one milestone. By five, the CDC list has most children doing "simple chores at home, like matching socks or clearing the table after eating"; the chart files matching socks a band later. Nothing supports "tidy the bedroom", a job with many steps and no visible finish.
Ages 6 to 7: gather rubbish, empty the dishwasher, match clean socks, weed the garden. Rests on: nothing cited. The AAP's 5-7 band shares the weeding and the emptying of bins, and parts company on the dishwasher.
Ages 8 to 9: load the dishwasher, put on a washing, put groceries away, walk dogs. Rests on: nothing cited. The AAP's 8-10 band agrees on groceries and walking a pet, and has a child putting away their own laundry, but holds doing and folding it back to 11-12.
Ages 10 to 11: clean bathrooms, vacuum carpets, clean the kitchen, prepare a simple meal. Rests on: nothing cited, though the AAP's 11-12 band roughly agrees: "clean the kitchen", "scrub toilets and clean the bathroom".
On the dishwasher: the printable has a child emptying it at 6-7 and loading it at 8-9; the AAP lists "unload the dishwasher" at 11-12. A five-year disagreement about one appliance suggests age is not the variable doing the work.
Age is a proxy for something else
What changes with age, measurably, is how much a child can hold in mind while doing something else. Gathercole, Pickering, Ambridge and Wearing (Developmental Psychology, 2004) gave eight subtests of the Working Memory Test Battery for Children, plus the Visual Patterns Test, to 736 children aged four to fifteen from five schools in south-west England (the four- and five-year-olds were not given three of the nine, the researchers judging the demands too hard for them), and found performance across the nine tests "increasing linearly from 4 to 14 years in general and leveling off between 14 and 15 years".
The average hides a wide spread inside each year group. Gathercole and Alloway put it in classroom terms in their 2007 guide for teachers: "in a typical class of 30 children aged 7 to 8 years, we would expect at least three of them to have the working memory capacities of the average 4-year-old child and three others to have the capacities of the average 11-year-old child".
The link to instructions has been tested in schools, not kitchens. Jaroslawska, Gathercole, Logie and Holmes (Memory & Cognition, 2016) gave 42 children aged 7 to 11 spoken instructions that began at one action and lengthened. The length a child could carry out correlated with verbal working memory in all three of their tasks (r = .40, .46 and .40): moderate correlations from a small sample, so working memory is part of following instructions, not the whole of it.
Age stands in for that capacity, and loosely.
The step test: count what has to be held in mind without a prompt
No source opened for this piece gives a table of steps by age, and this piece will not invent one. The only fixed point is the CDC's two-step instructions at 30 months. After that the number has to be found for the child in front of you.
Write down the job as an adult does it. Then mark the steps that have to be held in mind without a prompt. Four kinds count. The trigger: noticing that the job needs doing at all. The sequence: each step that the one before it does not make obvious. The conditions: every "if", such as plastic on the top rack or no wool in this wash. The return: any step that happens later, such as going back when the machine has finished, the hardest kind, because nothing in the room prompts it.
Steps the room prompts do not count: putting the next fork in the drawer takes no memory when the basket is in your hand. Thirty prompted movements can be a one-step job, and four unprompted ones can be too many. Gathercole and Alloway's example of a classroom instruction likely to defeat a child with poor working memory has exactly four: "Put your sheets on the green table, arrow cards in the packet, put your pencil away, and come and sit on the carpet".
Then cut. Start at a count the child already manages; for a small child, two. Strip the trigger and the return first, which means you supply the when. Turn conditions into sorting done beforehand. When that has gone right several times running, add one step. The AAP gives the same pacing: "introduce one new task at a time; a long list can be overwhelming". The teachers' guide prescribes "re-structuring multi-step tasks into separate independent steps, supported by memory aids if possible". At home that is a photograph of the laid table.
This method is built on those findings; it has not itself been trialled.
Three household jobs, cut down by steps rather than by age
The dishwasher. Emptying it as an adult means noticing the cycle has finished, knowing where everything lives and reaching high cupboards. The child-sized version is the cutlery basket to the cutlery drawer: one container, one destination, a finish anyone can see, and the sharp knives taken out by an adult first. Loading comes later, and not because it is long: every item is a condition, whether it goes in, which rack, which way up.
The laundry. "Do the laundry" is a dozen steps with a condition at most of them and a return an hour later. Cut by steps it becomes: everything on your floor into the basket; the basket to the machine; socks from this pile into pairs; your clothes from the dry pile to your drawer. The return stays with an adult or a timer until the rest is reliable.
Laying the table. Mark the places with mats and give one instruction: a fork at every mat. Then a fork and a knife. Then the full setting, with one place laid by you as the model. The trigger is handed over last, tied to something audible: when the oven timer goes, the table is yours.
In each case the job got smaller and the standard did not move. Every fork goes in the fork slot. Every sock gets its pair. Naming the job that precisely is what this site's piece "How to split chores with your partner" asks of adults too: name the job, not the room.
What the research does and does not show about chores and later outcomes
The claim usually attached to chore charts, that children who start at three or four become more successful adults, is credited to a University of Minnesota study. There is no such study to read. The credit points at a two-page feature headed "Involving children in household tasks: is it worth the effort?", carrying the line "AS PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA" and dated September 2002, which describes an unpublished reanalysis by Marty Rossmann of 84 young adults from Diana Baumrind's Bay Area cohort. It gives no effect sizes and no controls, and PubMed and Crossref, searched on 20 September 2026, return no journal article reporting it.
Nor can the feature itself be checked. No copy on a University domain can now be found; the only readable copy is a PDF whose own metadata names its author as Hill Web Creations rather than the University, dates its creation to 24 February 2014, and ends with a plug for another party's article published that same day. Its date, its wording and its attribution are all read off a marketing reprint. That is what "a University of Minnesota study" means here.
The published evidence is more modest. White, DeBoer and Scharf (Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 2019) took 9,971 children from a US national cohort entering kindergarten in 2010 to 2011. Parents reported how often the child did chores in kindergarten; in third grade the children rated themselves. Chore frequency was "positively associated" with how they rated their own social and academic competence and life satisfaction, independent of sex, family income and parent education; those who rarely did chores had greater odds of scoring in the bottom fifth, with odds ratios between 1.17 and 1.27.
Those are small associations in an observational study, and the authors' conclusion says "associated", not caused. Neither document says which chore belongs at which age.
The mistake adults make: lowering the standard instead of the step count
When a job is too big for a child there are two ways to make it fit. One is to keep the job whole and accept less: the bed half made. The other is to cut the job down and hold what remains to the household's normal standard. The first feels kind, but it teaches that a job is finished when it is not, and it leaves an adult redoing the work, which children notice.
The AAP's advice is "Just don't expect perfection; this is a learning process". A five-year-old's duvet will be lumpy, which is skill, and comes with repetition. A duvet pulled halfway up is a different thing: the job was longer than the child could hold. Shorten it to one step, duvet to the pillow, and that step can be done completely every morning.
A rule of thumb, the two places it breaks, and why this stops at twelve
The rule of thumb: a job is age-appropriate when the child can hold every unprompted step in it, to the household's standard. On how many chores a child should have, no source here gives a number; the AAP warns only against assigning "too many responsibilities". Whether any of it should be paid is a separate argument, and not one this piece settles.
The rule breaks in two places. The first is safety. A step count says nothing about knives, hobs, bleach or heights, and a two-step job can still be a dangerous one. The NHS Tayside sheet tells parents to "ensure they are safe with some chores and equipment being used". The second is willingness. The test measures what a child can hold, not what a child will do.
This piece stops at twelve. Capacity has not stopped growing by then: the 2004 battery has it rising to about fourteen, and its backward digit recall test (hearing digits, saying them in reverse) averaged 15.08 lists correct at ten to twelve against 18.50 at thirteen to fifteen. But Gathercole and Alloway put the average eleven-year-old "quite close to adult levels", and no source opened for this piece assigns a household job to an age. Past twelve, on the reading here, the count is no longer the thing in the way: a teenager who leaves the dishwasher full is not short of the room to hold its steps, and cutting the job smaller will not supply what is missing. That is a different problem.
Nothing here is medical or developmental advice. The CDC milestones quoted above describe what most children do by an age, not what any one child should; a worry about a child's development is for a health professional and not for a chore chart. This page was checked against its sources on 20 September 2026.
Sources
- Carries the first paragraph of section 1 and the printable's placements used in sections 1 and 2 (six bands; empty dishwasher and match clean socks at 6-7; load dishwasher at 8-9). The post's metadata gives datePublished 2013-11-13 and the author as Jennifer Flanders. Verbatim on the page: "Parents often ask us about our philosophy on children's chores, but we've found that what many of them are really looking for is some idea of what sorts of chores their child might be expected to do at what ages. So to that end, I've created this little free printable chart". The post cites no research; its only quotation is from Abigail Van Buren. I downloaded the linked PDF (flandersfamily.info/web/wp-content/uploads/2013/11/Age-Appropriate-Chore-Chart-for-Children.pdf) and extracted its text on 20 September 2026: it is marked "Copyright 2013 www.flandersfamily.info" and has the bands 2-3, 4-5, 6-7, 8-9, 10-11, 12 and up, and includes "Fetch diapers & wipes", "Bake cookies" and "Shop for groceries w/list". Its 6-7 band reads, in this order: Gather trash / Fold towels / Dust mop floors / Empty dishwasher / Match clean socks / Weed garden / Rake leaves / Peel potatoes or carrots / Make salad / Replace toilet paper roll. That list is the one section 1 compares with the NHS Tayside sheet, and it is the basis for naming four rewordings. The page's JSON-LD, read the same day, gives datePublished 2013-11-13T13:22:05+00:00 and dateModified 2026-06-02T11:52:05+00:00, so the quoted sentence is the wording of the post as it now stands rather than demonstrably the 2013 text; the bands and the job lists are fixed independently by the linked PDF, marked "© Copyright 2013 www.flandersfamily.info". "The earliest dated version I can find" describes my search; it is not proof that nothing earlier exists. — Jennifer Flanders, "Age-Appropriate Chores for Children", Flanders Family Home Life (flandersfamily.info), 13 November 2013, with its printable PDF chart, 2013
- Carries the second paragraph of section 1, the job lists in section 2 (given in this sheet's wording, condensed) and the safety quotation in section 8. Two-page PDF headed "Chores for Children - Activity Ideas / NHS Tayside Child Health Occupational Therapy Services / Age Appropriate Chores for Children"; the file's metadata gives a creation date of 15 February 2017. Same six bands as the 2013 printable. Downloaded and text-extracted 20 September 2026. Its 6-7 list reads: Gather rubbish / Fold towels / Dust/Mop floors / Empty dishwasher / Match clean socks / Weed garden / Rake leaves / Peel potatoes and carrots / Make salad / Replace toilet roll - the ten items of the 2013 chart in the same order, with four reworded: trash to rubbish, "Dust mop floors" to "Dust/Mop floors", potatoes or carrots to potatoes and carrots, and toilet paper roll to toilet roll. Section 1 now says four; earlier drafts said three, having treated the dust-mop line as unchanged when it is the one change that alters the instruction. The PDF's document information dictionary gives /CreationDate D:20170215105203Z00'00', /Title "Microsoft Word - prod_271767-2" and /Producer "GPL Ghostscript 9.05". Also verbatim in the sheet: "Fetch nappies and wipes", "Bake cookies", "Shop for groceries w/list", "Load Dishwasher" and "Put on a washing" under 8-9, its 10-11 band (Clean Bathrooms / Vacuum carpets / Clean Kitchen / Hang out washing / Prepare a simple meal / Bring in mail / Sweep out garage / Change light bulbs), and the introduction: "Children will benefit from you helping and working alongside them to learn these chores before you decide they are able to manage on their own and ensure they are safe with some chores and equipment being used." No source or reference appears anywhere in it. Crucially, the sheet does not say where its list came from: the matching text and the two dates are consistent with the 2013 chart being its ancestor, but they do not establish the direction of copying or exclude a common earlier source, and the standfirst and section 1 are written to claim no more than that. — NHS Tayside Child Health Occupational Therapy Services, "Age Appropriate Chores for Children" (advice sheet, PDF), 2017
- Carries every AAP statement in sections 1, 2, 4, 7 and 8. Page source fetched and read 20 September 2026; it shows "Last Updated 2/9/2024" and "Source Adapted from Caring for Your School-Age Child: Ages 5 to 12, 3rd edition (Copyright 2018 American Academy of Pediatrics)". Bands verbatim: 5-7 years ("Make their own beds, set and clear the table for mealtimes, weed and rake leaves ... empty wastebaskets, sweep floors, sort laundry ..."); 8-10 years ("All of the above, plus vacuum, help make dinner, make their own snacks, take a pet for walk, put away their own laundry and put away groceries"); 11-12 years ("All of the above, as well as clean the kitchen, change bedsheets, unload the dishwasher, do and fold laundry, scrub toilets and clean the bathroom, wash the car, cook a simple meal with supervision ..."). No study or other reference is given for any band; the only attribution on the page is that Source line, which names an AAP parenting book, and that is what section 1 now says rather than the earlier and careless "cites no research". The only occurrence of "dishwasher" on the page is "unload the dishwasher" at 11-12. The 8-10 band contains "put away their own laundry", so laundry is present at 8-10 and only "do and fold laundry" waits for 11-12, which is what section 2 now states. Also verbatim: "Just don't expect perfection; this is a learning process, and children will develop their skills over time"; "With a school-age child, particularly one who has not taken on responsibilities before, introduce one new task at a time; a long list can be overwhelming"; "Sometimes parents may demand too much of their children or criticize the outcome of the chore. Or, they may assign too many responsibilities." The page names no number of chores. It is US guidance. Section 1's "the only national paediatric body whose bands I could find in writing" is a statement about my search, not about every body in existence. Searching nhs.uk on 20 September 2026 I found no national chore-by-age page there; what came back was local NHS material, including the Tayside sheet cited above and a CNWL children's page, "Developing Independence" at hillingdoncyp.cnwl.nhs.uk/5-10-years/development/developing-independence, which I opened the same day and which names a few household jobs for five- to ten-year-olds ("lay the table for dinner, put their dirty clothes in the laundry basket or ... tidy their room") without banding them by age. Section 1 is written to claim no more than that, and an earlier flat "there is no equivalent page on nhs.uk" has been removed: it was an unhedged negative about a whole domain, and it read as though it excluded the NHS sheet the same section had just described. — American Academy of Pediatrics, "Age-Appropriate Chores for Children", HealthyChildren.org, 2024
- Carries the 2-3 band's "rests on" in section 2 and the fixed point in the first paragraph of section 4. Verbatim: "Developmental milestones are things most children (75% or more) can do by a certain age"; "Follows two-step instructions like 'Put the toy down and close the door.'"; "Follows simple routines when told, like helping to pick up toys when you say, 'It's clean-up time.'" These are US developmental-surveillance milestones, not a test of any individual child. Read 20 September 2026. — US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Milestones by 30 Months", Learn the Signs. Act Early., accessed 2026
- Carries the 4-5 band's "rests on" in section 2. Verbatim milestone: "Does simple chores at home, like matching socks or clearing the table after eating", under the same 75%-or-more definition. The page showed a last-updated date of 15 May 2026 when read on 20 September 2026. — US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, "Milestones by 5 Years", Learn the Signs. Act Early., 2026
- Carries the first paragraph of section 3 and the two backward-digit-recall means in section 8. This URL is the full-text PDF on a co-author's University of Manchester page; I downloaded it and extracted the text on 20 September 2026. Participants, verbatim: "Children attending five schools (three primary schools and two secondary schools) in southwest England participated in this study"; the per-age counts in the Method sum to 736 (43+101+91+96+63+98+101+37+45+14+47), and 18 children were later excluded as outliers. Procedure, verbatim: "Nine tests were administered to each child: eight subtests of the Working Memory Test Battery for Children (Pickering & Gathercole, 2001), and the Visual Patterns Test (Della Sala et al., 1997)." That Procedure sentence is the paper's own summary, and the Participants section qualifies it: "All children completed the following tests: backward digit recall, word list recall, nonword list recall, block recall, and the Visual Patterns Test. The listening recall, counting recall, and mazes memory tests were not administered to children in the two youngest year groups (4- and 5-year-olds) because the task demands were too difficult." Section 3 now carries that exclusion; an earlier draft implied every child sat all nine, and an earlier draft than that wrongly attributed all nine tests to the battery. On the exclusions: "A total of 18 children were excluded from all subsequent analyses on this basis", and the group sizes then given (144, 184, 154, 132, 105) sum to 719. Results, verbatim: "All nine tests yielded broadly similar developmental functions, with performance increasing linearly from 4 to 14 years in general and leveling off between 14 and 15 years"; the next sentence notes one departure, the Visual Patterns Test, which reached an asymptote at 11 years, which is why the piece keeps the authors' "in general" inside the quotation. Table 2, backward digit recall, mean (SD) by age band: 6-7 years 10.92 (3.11), n = 184; 8-9 years 12.77 (3.20), n = 154; 10-12 years 15.08 (3.66), n = 132; 13-15 years 18.50 (5.67), n = 105. Section 8 uses the last two figures to concede that capacity keeps growing past twelve. Note that "10-12" is Table 2's own band label; the Participants list contains no twelve-year-olds, and the outlier passage calls the same band "10-11 years". Scores are the number of lists correctly recalled under a span procedure, not span lengths, which the piece does not present them as. — Gathercole, S. E., Pickering, S. J., Ambridge, B., & Wearing, H., "The Structure of Working Memory From 4 to 15 Years of Age", Developmental Psychology, 40(2), 177-190, doi 10.1037/0012-1649.40.2.177, 2004
- Carries the second paragraph of section 3, the two guide quotations in section 4 and "quite close to adult levels" in section 8. A 24-page booklet for teachers by the researchers, copyright 2007, published by Harcourt Assessment, London; this URL is a copy hosted by the UK PDNet network, which I downloaded and read on 20 September 2026. Page 7 verbatim: "in a typical class of 30 children aged 7 to 8 years, we would expect at least three of them to have the working memory capacities of the average 4-year-old child and three others to have the capacities of the average 11-year-old child, which is quite close to adult levels". Note what the trailing clause attaches to: it describes the average eleven-year-old's capacity, not a claim that working memory stops growing, so section 8 uses it only in that sense and states the continued growth from Table 2 of the 2004 paper alongside it. Page 16 lists, among activities likely to exceed the capacities of a child with working memory deficits, "remembering and successfully following lengthy instructions (e.g. Put your sheets on the green table, arrow cards in the packet, put your pencil away, and come and sit on the carpet)", and among ways of reducing the load "re-structuring multi-step tasks into separate independent steps, supported by memory aids if possible". It is a practitioner guide, not a peer-reviewed paper, and it is about classrooms; applying it to household jobs is this piece's step, not the authors'. — Gathercole, S. E., & Alloway, T. P., "Understanding Working Memory: A Classroom Guide", Harcourt Assessment, London, 2007
- Carries the fourth paragraph of section 3. Open-access full text. Abstract: "Forty-two children 7-11 years of age completed assessments of working memory, a real-world following-instructions task employing 3-D objects, and two new computerized instruction-following tasks"; "These results indicate that verbal working memory plays a key role in following instructions over extended periods of activity." Method: "Testing started at one action (e.g., Touch the red ruler), increased by one action per block ... and was terminated after three incorrect trials in one block." The correlation table gives the verbal working memory factor (Factor 2) against the three following-instructions tasks as .399 (p < .05), .457 and .403 (both p < .01), rounded in the piece to .40, .46 and .40. "Moderate" and "small sample" are my descriptions, not the authors'. — Jaroslawska, A. J., Gathercole, S. E., Logie, M. R., & Holmes, J., "Following instructions in a virtual school: Does working memory play a role?", Memory & Cognition, 44(4), 580-589, doi 10.3758/s13421-015-0579-2, 2016
- Carries the first two paragraphs of section 6, which report this document's provenance as much as its contents. It is NOT cited as evidence for anything about children. I downloaded the PDF and read it in full on 20 September 2026. Its text is headed "INVOLVING CHILDREN IN HOUSEHOLD TASKS: IS IT WORTH THE EFFORT?" and "AS PUBLISHED BY THE UNIVERSITY OF MINNESOTA"; it reports "Research by Marty Rossmann, emeritus associate professor of family education", says Rossmann "explored outcomes for 84 young adults" using "previously unexplored data collected from a longitudinal study by Diana Baumrind", who used "a sample of parents and children living in the San Francisco Bay area", and gives no statistics of any kind. It is dated "September 2002", and that date is followed by the document's actual last line, "Read comments on the topic by Home Destination in an article How to Make Moving to a New Home Easier for Children published February24, 2014" - rendered in the file without the space after February. An earlier draft of this note had the two lines the wrong way round; the body's "ends with a plug for another party's article published that same day" was right. Its embedded XMP metadata gives dc:title "Microsoft Word - Involving children in household tasks.docx", dc:creator "Hill Web Creations", xmp:CreateDate 2014-02-24T21:09:41-06:00 and pdf:Producer "Acrobat Distiller 11.0 (Windows)". So the file is a February 2014 reproduction credited to a party other than the University, carrying a plug for another party's article of the same date - which is what the body now says, in place of the earlier and misleading description of it as a reproduction on a magazine publisher's file server. Provenance search, same date: site-restricted searches of umn.edu found no copy, and Wayback Machine URL-index queries against research.umn.edu, www1.umn.edu, cehd.umn.edu, www.cehd.umn.edu and extension.umn.edu filtered for "household", "rossmann" or "chore" returned no captures. A second mirror at ww1.prweb.com/prfiles/2014/02/22/11608927/children-with-chores-at-home-University-of-Minnesota.pdf appears in search results but returned HTTP 523 and could not be opened, so nothing in the piece rests on it. Consequently the September 2002 date, the University attribution and the feature's wording are all attested only by this 2014 file, and section 6 says so rather than treating them as established. On the absence of a journal publication: a PubMed search for Rossmann M with household tasks or chores returned 0 records and a Crossref author-and-title query returned no matching work; that is a search result, not proof that no paper exists. — "Involving children in household tasks: is it worth the effort?" - a two-page feature on work by Marty Rossmann, headed "As published by the University of Minnesota" and dated September 2002, surviving only as a PDF created on 24 February 2014 and credited in its own metadata to Hill Web Creations, feature dated 2002; only readable copy created 2014
- Carries the third and fourth paragraphs of section 6. Section 6 introduces it as "the published evidence", not as the best or the largest: no systematic search of this literature was carried out for this piece, so no ranking is claimed. Re-read 20 September 2026. The PubMed record page returns a cookie notice to automated requests, so this URL is the NCBI E-utilities endpoint, which serves the full abstract for PMID 30507727. Verbatim: "We analyzed data from 9971 children participating in the Early Childhood Longitudinal Study-Kindergarten 2011 cohort entering kindergarten in the United States in 2010 to 2011. During kindergarten, parents reported the frequency with which their child performed chores. In the third grade, children responded to a questionnaire regarding their perceived interest or competence in academics, peer relationships, prosocial behavior, and life satisfaction"; "The frequency of chores in kindergarten was positively associated with a child's perception of social, academic, and life satisfaction competencies in the third grade, independent of sex, family income, and parent education (all P < 0.001)"; children who rarely performed chores "had greater odds of scoring in the bottom quintile on self-reported prosocial, academic ability, peer relationship, and life satisfaction scores (odds ratio [OR] = 1.17, 1.25, 1.24, and 1.27, respectively)"; conclusion: "performing chores in early elementary school was associated with later development of self-competence, prosocial behavior, and self-efficacy". I read the abstract only; the full text is paywalled, so the piece reports no limitations as the authors'. "Small" is my description of those odds ratios. — White, E. M., DeBoer, M. D., & Scharf, R. J., "Associations Between Household Chores and Childhood Self-Competency", Journal of Developmental & Behavioral Pediatrics, 40(3), 176-182, doi 10.1097/DBP.0000000000000637, 2019
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