Should children do chores?
Yes, and the reason is not the work getting done — it is that contributing to a household is associated with competence, responsibility and belonging in ways that are hard to teach directly.
What the evidence suggests. Longitudinal work has associated childhood participation in household tasks with later measures of self-sufficiency and wellbeing, and cross-cultural research finds that children in societies where contribution is expected from early childhood help spontaneously, without being asked or rewarded. The expectation appears to matter more than the task.
The mechanism. Being genuinely needed teaches that you are a contributing member of a group rather than a recipient of services. Tasks also build practical competence, tolerance for unglamorous necessity, and the understanding that a household runs on invisible labour someone performs.
What works, by age:
Toddlers, who want to help and are terrible at it. Accepting that help — badly done, slowly — is what establishes the habit. Turning it down because it is faster alone is the most common mistake, and by the time you want help it has been trained out.
Primary age: tidying their own things, laying a table, feeding a pet, sorting laundry, simple cooking.
Older children and teenagers: cooking a meal, their own laundry, cleaning a room properly, shopping — practical independence before leaving home.
On paying for chores. Contested. The argument against is that payment reframes contribution as a transaction and licenses opting out by declining the money; the argument for is that it teaches money management. A common compromise is that basic contribution is unpaid because you live here, with paid work available separately for larger optional jobs.
What makes it fail: inconsistency; demanding a standard beyond the child's ability; redoing the work visibly in front of them; using chores as punishment, which associates work with disgrace; and — consistently — unequal allocation between siblings by gender, which research finds persists and which children notice.
Do it alongside them when young, since companionable work is how it becomes normal rather than a sentence.