You already have an excuse for your child to help you with housework, and that is because a study by La Trobe University (Australia) has shown that children who carry out this type of activity at home have better academic results and better functions executives than those who do not participate in them.
Specifically, the researchers found that tasks such as cooking or gardening were beneficial for children, improving their ability to plan, change tasks, self-regulate and their memory to remember instructions. Of course, each task must be adapted to the age and ability of each child to avoid any type of accident.
To reach these conclusions, the authors analyzed questionnaires filled out in mid-2020 by parents and guardians of 207 children between the ages of 5 and 13. In them, they had to indicate the number of household tasks that their children carried out each day and the aspects of their executive function.
Executive functions begin to develop in early childhood
In other studies, it has already been observed that involving children in household chores can increase their feelings of autonomy and is related to better prosocial behaviors and greater life satisfaction. But this one, published in the Australian Occupational Therapy Journal, was the first to look at the effects of regular tasks on cognitive development.
Developing executive functions in childhood by doing household chores improves physical health and financial status in adulthood
Personal care tasks, such as preparing meals for themselves, and family care tasks, such as preparing someone else’s food, were found to significantly improve working memory and inhibition, which is the ability to think before acting. . Developing executive functions early is linked to better physical health and financial status in adulthood, according to the study results.
“Impairments or delays in the development of executive functioning can lead to difficulties in self-regulation, planning, and problem-solving abilities in adulthood, which have implications later in life for reading performance and mathematical ability. in addition to predicting general academic performance in later childhood”, says Deanna Tepper, director of the research.
Executive functions include working memory, inhibition, the ability to monitor and manipulate temporal information, the suppression of irrelevant information while concentrating on a task, or the ability to shift focus between tasks. All of these skills begin to develop in early childhood and continue to form throughout late adolescence and early adulthood, making it an easy and simple way to improve a child’s future.
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