"I hate chores! I wish I could get rid of chores forever!"
We get it: children HATE doing chores, especially when they involve yardwork or housecleaning. This is so prevalent (and accepted/catered to) nowadays that most modern fictional portrayals of chores either involve servants, take place on a farm or ranch, or use them as a way to paint the parents or guardians of the child character(s) in question in an unfavorable light at best so as to not risk alienating their audience. Sometimes, an allowance is brought up as a way to justify the chores in question. Can, and usually does, overlap with Laborious Laziness when the child(ren) put(s) more effort into avoiding the chore(s) in question than would be required to just do them. Related to Cathartic Chores and Children Do the Housework.
Obviously, this is Truth in Television for some Real Life children, especially kids that are The Slacker.
Examples:
Comic Strips
- Referenced in a Bizarro strip where a man is watching TV and a promo for the next episode of The Osbournes mentions the kids calling Child Services due to Ozzy making them do chores.
- Calvin and Hobbes
- Calvin hates doing chores, and while the most recurring example is his shoveling the driveway in winter because Misery Builds Character, he's just as likely to protest against making his bed or picking up his dirty laundry.
- In some strips, he gets back at his dad by turning the shoveled snow into Body Horror-struck snowmen.
- In another
, he shovels the snow back onto the driveway behind him.
Calvin: Why should OTHER people benefit from MY hard work?
Fan Works
- Referenced in Mike's New Ghostly Family; after the day when Nightmare attacked the Schmidt family and condemned the ghost children over how they did nothing to show that they changed for the better, they decided to take more proactive role in their redemption by helping their new adoptive father, Mike Schmidt, with doing day-to-day chores to make his life easier. Mike quickly notices that something's wrong, because he heard from his college friends with kids that children normally hate doing chores, so seeing the ghost kids do chores with enthusiasm made him quickly realize that something's not right here.
Literature
- In Tom Sawyer, Tom is forced to white-wash a fence, which he naturally doesn't want to do. So he acts like it's an enviable activity and therefore convinces the other kids that they DO want to, getting them to ask him to let them do it. He even makes them pay him for the privilege.
Live-Action TV
- Life with Derek: In one episode, the younger siblings start a protest over their chores, reasoning that they do more chores than Derek and Casey do but earn less allowance for it.
- House of Anubis: One of Victor's favorite punishments for the kids involves them doing an excessive amount of chores, all designed to make them miserable. Often he'll just hand them a toothbrush and send them off to go scrub toilets, though one subplot in Season 2 involved him giving Patricia and Eddie several weeks of detention, which involved chores like cleaning muddy boots, shoveling manure, and polishing things.
- Sesame Street: In an "Abby's Flying Fairy School" sketch, Blogg refuses to put his blocks away, so he wants to put them under the carpet instead. Even when the carpet turns out to be a magical, locked carpet, and therefore putting them away would be easier, he still doesn't do so.
- Phil of the Future: Phil mentions that in the future chores were outlawed for being child abuse. He's forced to do chores while he's stuck in the past, albeit with the assistance of future technology. His love interest Keely found doing chores with these gadgets fun.
- On Young Sheldon, teenage entrepreneur Georgie Cooper, already earning almost as much as his father George Cooper Sr., gets around this by channeling Tom Sawyer and subcontracting to neighbor kids at a dollar a chore. His father is not a happy man.
Web Animation
- TheOdd1sOut: In "A Book I Made as a Kid", James worries that the title of the eponymous book, I Do Not Like This Family, made his teacher think he was abused. He says that he was not abused, but he just hated doing chores.
Western Animation
- Cricket Green of Big City Greens is a complete offender of this trope, despising the chores of his family and would rather have fun. However, certain episodes show him willingly want to help his family, such as helping Bill renovate the bathroom and fix the roof, and joining his family in replanting baby carrots.
- In an episode of Cow and Chicken, Chicken tries to earn some quick money by doing yardwork for the resident child-hating Grumpy Old Man's house (who will only pay him two dollars). Said back yard is stated to be the size of Switzerland, and Chicken nearly dies from exhaustion when he's done. The old guy refuses to pay because Chicken finished after sundown, which leads to him getting his ass kicked by Supercow.
- The Fairly OddParents!. This trope kicks off a number of Timmy Turner's more poorly thought-out wishes:
- In the episode "Talkin' Trash", Timmy has Cosmo use magic to take out the trash, and has done so ever since Cosmo and Wanda were assigned to him. Cosmo, of course, poofs the garbage into the crawlspace under the Turner house, where it causes "dirty magic" to cause problems with the house. This leads to them calling in Wanda's father Big Daddy, who runs Fairy World's waste management like a Mafia operation. Even resident badass By-the-Book Cop Jorgen Von Strangle backs down when Big Daddy threatens to stop trash collection due to Timmy's disrespecting him.
- In the episode "It's a Wishful Life", Timmy does a lot of hard work for multiple people but is berated for it, eventually causing him to wish that he'd never been born. The result is the world being a much better place due to his absence.
- In the episode "NegaTimmy", Timmy gets so fed up with his chores that he wishes that he had to do the opposite of whatever his parents tell him to do. This goes to the logical extreme when his Dad tells him to be good at school, causing him to turn into a horror movie villain-type character.
- In The Loud House episode "Chore and Peace", this is downplayed. Lincoln Loud hates taking out the trash because he thinks it's the hardest chore (which is understandable since he lives in a house of thirteen), but he doesn't want to get out of doing chores altogether; he just wants an easier chore.
- Johnny Test: Johnny will always avoid doing chores when possible, which isn't difficult with his genius sisters' inventions. For example, in "101 Johnnies", he makes clones of himself to do chores in his place. In the same episode, his sisters are shown to be Not So Above It All when they create robot version of themselves to do chores while they're watching their next-door neighbour Gil.
- Angelo Rules: Angelo doesn't like doing chores, so he'll come up with a plan to avoid them. In "Chore Wars", after getting tired of doing the difficult stuff like mowing the lawn or emptying the trash while Elena does easy chores like putting frost on cupcakes and picking flowers, he manages to convince his sister to do all his chores (among many others) by convincing her that her crush Hunter, who was coming to their house, doesn't like lazy girls who live in an untidy house.
- In The Little Rascals short "Big City Rascals", the boys try to escape household chores by visiting Darla's uncle on his farm. They soon come to prefer household chores to farm chores.
- In the Ready Jet Go! episode "Chore Day", Jet doesn't want to do his chores because he thinks they're boring, and would rather play around with his friends. As it turns out, all his friends have to do chores as well — Sydney has to fold the laundry, Sean has to water the plants, and Mindy has to clean up her toys — but they find ways to make the chores fun and get them done quicker by applying science. In the end, Jet's chore was to test out the hover scooters, and he ends up having a lot of fun with it.
