Anything that convinces your family to take more responsibility at home is worth a shot. However, one mom’s parenting hack backfired, proving that it’s going to take more than a quick fix to solve a problem that many moms face daily.
Mom Miranda Crimbring came up with a clever trick to get her kids and husband to clean up and pitch in with the house work. Unfortunately, her plan backfired—and instead of encouraging her family to help, it perfectly illustrated the idea that moms are more likely to be bear the brunt of invisible labor.
In a Facebook post, Crimbring shared a picture of a small scrap of paper with a $5 bill taped to the back of it. As she explains in the post, she left the paper scrap on the bathroom floor to see how long it would take her family to pick it up and discover the money underneath.
“Well, while trying to prove a point to my kids, we’ve just surpassed the 48-hour mark of the ‘who will pick up the random piece of trash that they KNOW isn’t supposed to be there’ challenge,” she wrote in the caption. “Between the kids and the husband, and multiple trips in and out of the bathroom, this little piece of heaven may just be in it for the long haul!”
While her clever parenting hack failed miserably it serves a much bigger purpose as an important reminder of the under-appreciated tasks mom perform daily, also known as invisible labor.
—Shahrzad Warkentin
Featured photo: Volha Flaxeco via Unsplash
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