despite the help. My wife sometimes wants to go easy on them and do their work for them, but I normally try to get her to not help them too much.

Now that some of my kids are older, one advantage of our approach is becoming clear. Even though they didn’t have to clean the whole house often or do much deep cleaning as kids, they are used to having a clean and tidy house most of the time, despite growing up in a home with lots of kids. The three that are in college are clearly tidier and more orderly than most of their friends and roommates or (in one case) spouses, and generally keep their apartments cleaner than most college kids.

I think this is at least partly a result of having grown up in such tidy, clean homes — neither I nor (especially) my wife are naturally super tidy people. My wife’s apartment looked like a Federal disaster area when we were dating st BYU, it was almost a show-stopper for me. She grew up in a home with 6 siblings and no housekeeping help, so her threshold for messiness and dirtiness was very high, relative to me. Out kids are very different.