Of all the categories of household grievance this Journal evaluates, the chore-based action presents the most persistent methodological difficulty. The problem is not establishing that a chore was owed. Chores are plainly owed, in any household worth its name, and the obligation to perform them is, if not written down, at least spoken aloud with sufficient frequency to constitute something like a course of dealing. The problem is proving the damages — which is to say, translating the thing a child did not do into a number a parent could, in theory, collect.
This note sets out the Journal's preferred methodology. It is, as methodologies go, neither original nor rigorous. We offer it here chiefly because we are tired of reinventing it each time a new matter comes in, and because we suspect that other practitioners in this field — all of them hypothetical — may benefit from a shared framework.
Step One: Identify the Baseline Task
Every chore-based action begins with a baseline task: the specific household labor that was assigned, accepted (by whatever constitutes acceptance in a household, which is a low bar), and unperformed. Common examples include: emptying the dishwasher; taking out the recycling; clearing the table after dinner; "cleaning your room," which is of course a category rather than a task and will present its own difficulties, addressed below.
The task must be specified with as much particularity as the record allows. "You never help" is not a task. "Empty the dishwasher before dinner" is a task. In the absence of particularity, the Journal's default has been to construct a reasonable inference from the surrounding sighs.
Step Two: Establish the Market Rate
Here is where most practitioners go wrong. There is a natural temptation, in valuing domestic labor, to adopt the minimum wage as a conservative benchmark, or the local rate for professional cleaning services as an aggressive one. We recommend neither. The relevant rate is not the rate at which a stranger would perform the task. It is the rate at which the parent would perform it — and parents, we think we can safely say, are not strangers.
This Journal's house methodology values uncompensated parental labor at what we call the "if-I-must-then-fine rate," which is calculated by taking the local median professional rate for the task in question and multiplying it by a coefficient reflecting the parent's state of mind at the moment of performance. A parent emptying a dishwasher at 9:45 PM on a school night, having already reminded their child to do it three times, is performing labor at a substantial premium. The coefficient, in our experience, is rarely below 1.6.
Step Three: Adjust for the Compounding Problem
Chore-based grievances, unlike most commercial disputes, compound. The single unmade bed, standing alone, is a de minimis wrong. Seven hundred and forty-three consecutive unmade beds, considered as a continuing course of conduct, is something else entirely. The Journal's practice is to treat repeated non-performance as cumulative rather than episodic — that is, to treat each day of non-performance as a fresh breach, and to compound them across the period at issue.
Applied rigorously, this methodology produces very large numbers very quickly. A thirteen-year-old who has failed to take out the trash for four years, measured at the if-I-must-then-fine rate, can accrue damages well into five figures. We do not present these figures to the opposing party. We present them to ourselves, in private, and then we take a breath.
There is a reason the law does not concern itself with trifles. If it did, we would all owe each other tremendous sums.
Step Four: Address the "They Were Going to Do It Anyway" Defense
No practice guide on chore-based actions would be complete without addressing the defense most frequently raised against them, which is that the minor defendant "was going to do it anyway." This is a surprisingly resilient argument. It has the structural form of an affirmative defense without any of the evidentiary requirements, because no defendant is ever in a position to prove what they were about to do before they were interrupted by being asked about it.
The Journal's position is that the defense fails as a matter of law for the simple reason that the tense is wrong. The question is not what the minor defendant was going to do. The question is what the minor defendant did, and when. A chore owed is a chore present. A chore "about to be done" is, with respect, a chore not done.
Minor defendants rarely find this argument persuasive. They do, however, find it tiring, which is, in our experience, nearly as good.
A Note on the Limits of the Methodology
We would be remiss not to observe that the entire methodology set out above is, in the final analysis, of no practical use. No court will enforce the damages calculated under it. No minor will pay them. The parent who diligently tabulates their uncompensated labor in accordance with this framework will arrive, with great accuracy, at a number that is exactly as collectible as it is satisfying to calculate, which is to say: not at all.
We recommend the exercise anyway. It is, in the Journal's experience, better than shouting, and cheaper than therapy, and considerably more organized than most of the feelings it is meant to discharge.