Should you pay kids for chores? What 25 years of research actually says
Most parenting blogs say paying kids for chores ruins motivation. The research is more nuanced than that, and the practical answer comes down to which chores you're paying for.
Quick read.
- The blanket “don’t pay for chores, you’ll ruin their motivation” advice is largely traceable to one famous 1973 study about kids drawing with felt-tip markers, plus Alfie Kohn’s 1993 book Punished by Rewards that popularized it.
- Subsequent meta-analyses generally find that extrinsic rewards have the strongest undermining effect on activities the kid was already intrinsically interested in. For genuinely boring chores, the effect is much smaller (or arguable, depending on which meta-analysis you read).
- The system that survives the research: separate family-membership tasks (unpaid, expected) from paid jobs (rated, optional). Mixing them up is what causes most of the problems people blame on “paying for chores” in general.
- The University of Minnesota’s longitudinal data suggests that whether kids do chores at all matters far more than how they’re compensated.
A few months ago, our 8-year-old asked how much we’d pay her to clear the table. We’d been not paying for chores on principle. Every parenting blog we’d read had told us paying kids ruined their work ethic. The clinical psychologist we mentioned this to in passing laughed and pointed out, gently, that the advice we’d absorbed was based on a misreading of one famous study from the 1970s.
She was right. Once we actually went and read the research, the picture got more interesting and a lot more practical.
The mistake most parents make
The conventional “don’t pay for chores” advice has a real source, and it’s worth naming. In 1993, Alfie Kohn published Punished by Rewards, a popular book arguing that gold stars, allowances, grades, and praise all work the same way: as manipulation that undermines intrinsic motivation, autonomy, and ethical development. Kohn drew heavily on early research showing that paying people for things they already enjoy can reduce their interest. The book was influential, and the parenting-blog ecosystem turned it into a simpler claim: don’t pay your kids for chores, ever, or you’ll wreck them.
The simpler claim has the same problem as most simplifications: it loses the conditions under which the original finding applies. Kohn’s own argument is more careful than the blog version. The studies he draws on don’t show that all extrinsic rewards crowd out all intrinsic motivation. They show that expected, contingent rewards can crowd out intrinsic interest in activities people already find rewarding for their own sake. The question for parents is whether your typical chore (taking out the trash, scrubbing a toilet, vacuuming the car) is something your kid was about to do for fun anyway. Almost always: no.
Treating “paying for any chore is bad” as the rule that follows from the research is what causes the practical problems most families run into. The fix is to look at what the research actually says, then design the system around the conditions that matter.
What the research actually says
The single most-cited study in this whole area is Lepper, Greene, and Nisbett (1973). The setup is almost too clean: preschoolers who already enjoyed drawing with felt-tip markers were divided into three groups. One group was told they’d get a “Good Player Award” if they drew. A second got the same award later, but with no advance promise. A third got nothing. Two weeks afterward, the kids in the expected-reward group spent noticeably less of their free time drawing on their own than the kids in the other two groups. The unexpected-reward group looked the same as the no-reward group. The takeaway: expected, contingent rewards for activities kids already love can erode the love itself. Researchers called this the overjustification effect.
That’s the headline result that traveled. What didn’t travel as well is that this finding requires the kid to already be intrinsically interested in the activity. Drawing for a 4-year-old who loves drawing is not the same animal as taking out the trash for an 11-year-old who has never once volunteered to take out the trash.
The literature got a lot more granular after that. The most cited synthesis is Deci, Koestner, and Ryan’s 1999 meta-analysis, which pooled results from 128 experiments. Their headline finding: tangible rewards that are expected and contingent on engagement do show a measurable undermining effect (effect size around d = −0.40, in their numbers). Verbal praise, by contrast, tends to boost intrinsic motivation. So the picture is conditional on what kind of reward, what kind of contingency, and what kind of activity.
Worth noting: not everyone agrees this is the right read of the meta-analytic data. Cameron and Pierce’s 1994 meta-analysis of 96 studies came to a softer conclusion. They found the negative effect of rewards on intrinsic motivation was small, only consistent for expected tangible rewards, and that verbal praise was a clear positive. Deci, Ryan, and others have published rebuttals. The honest summary is that the field is not monolithic, but both camps agree the effect depends on context. For chores specifically, both readings converge on a useful place: if the activity wasn’t intrinsically rewarding to begin with, there isn’t much intrinsic motivation for the reward to displace.
There’s also a separate question worth pulling in here: does whether your kid does chores at all matter for how they turn out? The most-cited longitudinal answer comes from Marty Rossmann at the University of Minnesota, who re-analyzed long-running data originally collected by Diana Baumrind starting in 1967. Rossmann found that participation in household tasks at ages 3 and 4 was the single strongest predictor of young-adult success in the mid-20s, holding when she controlled for socioeconomic status, family structure, and education. With one striking caveat: kids who didn’t start chores until age 15 or 16 actually showed worse outcomes than peers who started early or who’d never had chores. The sample is small (around 84 participants from one San Francisco cohort) and this is a re-analysis rather than a randomized trial, so generalize with care. But it’s interesting that “whether kids do chores at all” looks like a much bigger lever than “whether kids get paid for them.”
The reframe: Don’t pay for what kids would do anyway. Do pay (or use a points equivalent) for the boring stuff that needs doing. The system collapses when those two categories get mixed up.
The system: separate “family contributions” from “paid jobs”
The cleanest way to operationalize the research is to draw a hard line between two categories of household work.
Family contributions (unpaid, expected). These are the defaults of being a member of the household. Make your own bed. Bring your dishes to the sink. Pick up after yourself. Put away your shoes. Feed yourself when you can. These are not optional, and they aren’t paid. Paying for them implies they’re optional, and that opens a negotiation you don’t want.
Paid jobs (rated, optional). These are the chores an adult might otherwise hire out. Mowing the lawn. Deep-cleaning the fridge. Vacuuming the car. Folding the family laundry (not just their own). Walking the dog when it isn’t already their day. These get a rate, the rate is known in advance, and the kid can decline. They can also negotiate. The system feels honest because it is honest: real work for real money, on terms close enough to a real job to start teaching how that works.
The reason this distinction holds up is that it lines up with the research. The contributions are a low-novelty, low-intrinsic-motivation activity that pretty much every kid will resist some weeks; you’re not crowding out anything by not paying for them, but paying for them would introduce a needless contingency that erodes the “this is just what we do” framing. The paid jobs are a discrete, optional unit of work the kid can opt into or out of, where the reward is unambiguous and the activity wasn’t going to happen for its own sake.
Practical notes on the rates and frequency: keep paid-job rates roughly aligned with what an adult might pay a teenager from the neighborhood for the same task. For a 9-year-old that might mean $1 to $3 per job; for a 13-year-old, $3 to $10. Sibling fairness matters: the same job should pay the same regardless of who does it, even if the older kid is faster. Capability differences are real but they’re separate from the rate.
If you’d rather not deal in cash directly, points are the friendlier abstraction. They work like credit-card rewards points: kids earn them, then redeem them for cash, screen time, an outing, or save toward a bigger goal, all from the same catalog at a fixed conversion rate you set (10 points = $1 is the cleanest). How Kinhold points work like credit-card rewards is the long version of how to set this up; How to size points without going broke walks through the budget math.
Scripts: what to say
When your kid asks to be paid for a contribution.
“Loading your dishes is part of being in this family. I don’t get paid for doing mine, and you won’t be paid for doing yours. If you want to earn money, here’s the list of paid jobs.”
When your kid asks for a raise on an existing paid job.
“Tell me what’s changed about the job. Are you doing it more often, doing it better, or doing more of it? If so, let’s renegotiate. If not, the rate stays.”
When a sibling complains the rate is unfair because the older kid is faster.
“Same job, same rate. If you want the rate, you can do the job. The older kid being faster isn’t a reason to pay them more.”
When your kid wants to swap a contribution for cash so they don’t have to do it.
“That’s not how it works. Contributions aren’t optional. If you genuinely don’t have time today because of homework or sports, we can shift it. We can’t trade it away.”
When you catch yourself wanting to pay for a contribution to get peace.
Don’t. Two days of friction is cheaper than the year of negotiation that follows.
Frequently asked questions
How much should I pay per chore?
Match what you’d pay a neighbor’s teenager for the same task. Roughly: $1 to $3 per job for ages 8 to 10, $3 to $7 for 11 to 13, $5 to $15 for 14+. Keep the math easy enough that the kid can do it in their head. How to size points without going broke walks through this calibration in more detail.
Should the rate scale with age?
Yes for the type of job, no for the individual rate. A 9-year-old folding the family laundry should be paid the same as a 13-year-old folding the family laundry. Scale up by giving older kids access to harder jobs at higher rates, not by paying them more for the same work. Capability differences are real but they belong on the job-list side, not the rate side.
What if my kid refuses to do unpaid family contributions?
Treat it the way you’d treat any other rule in the household: natural consequences, not bigger rewards. If the bed isn’t made, screen time waits. If the dishes aren’t brought to the sink, dinner doesn’t start. The thing you’re trying to avoid is escalating into a payment to fix a refusal, which trains exactly the behavior you don’t want.
Won’t paying my kid for chores make them expect to be paid for everything as an adult?
The research most directly relevant here is Rossmann’s longitudinal study, which suggests it’s whether kids participate in household work, not how they’re compensated, that predicts adult outcomes. Kids who never had chores didn’t fare especially well. Kids who started early did, regardless of pay structure. Pay your kids for paid jobs, don’t pay them for contributions, and don’t worry about the long-term character question on the basis of this one variable.
What age should we start?
Family contributions can start as soon as a 2-year-old can put a toy in a basket. Paid jobs make more sense once a kid can hold a multi-step task in their head and complete it without supervision, which for most kids is somewhere around age 7 or 8. Younger than that, the rate-and-reward layer adds more confusion than it does value. (We’re working on a follow-up post on age-appropriate chores; you’ll see it soon.)
Should siblings get equal rates for the same chore?
Yes. Same job, same rate. Capability differences are real and they belong on the job-list side: an 11-year-old can mow the lawn but a 6-year-old can’t, so the 6-year-old’s job list doesn’t include mowing. But if both kids are doing the same job, both kids get the same rate. The first time you pay one kid more for the same work, you’ve broken the system’s claim to fairness.
Family contributions are about belonging. Paid jobs are about value created. The research mostly supports the distinction; the system mostly survives the science.
