The Accomplished Child Who Can't Do Laundry

The Accomplished Child Who Can't Do Laundry

What happens when childhood prepares young people to achieve but gives them fewer opportunities to practice autonomy?

The scene has become a genre unto itself on college move-in day.

A teenager arrives with an impressive transcript, years of extracurricular activities, perhaps a competitive sport or an instrument played well enough to mention on an application — and then stands in front of a washing machine as though someone has just asked them to operate a small nuclear reactor.

The refrigerator contains energy drinks and nothing that could reasonably become dinner.

The bathroom is beginning to develop its own ecosystem.

Somewhere, a parent receives a text asking whether whites and colors actually need to be separated.

It is a funny image.

And it is tempting to stop there.

Another round of kids these days.

Except laundry isn't particularly difficult. Neither is learning to boil pasta, clean a bathroom or buy groceries. Most young adults who do not know how to perform these tasks can learn them quickly.

The washing machine was never really the interesting part.

The more interesting question is what happens when a young person can arrive at one of the most demanding intellectual environments of their life having accumulated years of experience solving difficult academic problems — while having had comparatively fewer opportunities to solve ordinary problems without an adult already organizing the solution.

A recent letter in The Guardian raised one version of this question, arguing that some middle-class students arrive at university well prepared academically but surprisingly inexperienced with cooking, cleaning, shopping and laundry.

But reducing the issue to household chores risks missing something much more interesting.

The developmental question isn't whether teenagers know how to wash their sheets.

It is how competence gets built in the first place.

Achievement and competence are not the same thing

A teenager can be exceptionally good at the things adults have taught them to regard as important.

Study for this exam.

Practice this instrument.

Train for this competition.

Complete this application.

Meet this deadline.

Those are genuine abilities. They require discipline, persistence and considerable cognitive skill.

But adulthood contains another category of problems.

What do I eat for the next four days with the money I have?

What happens when I miss the bus?

How do I make an appointment?

How do I decide what needs to be done when nobody has given me a list?

What happens when I make a small mistake and there is nobody nearby to repair it?

These problems rarely earn certificates.

They do, however, require planning, initiation, judgment, frustration tolerance and the ability to adjust after something goes wrong.

And psychology gives us a useful way of understanding why practicing those things might matter.

Psychologist Albert Bandura's theory of self-efficacy concerns people's beliefs about their capacity to produce desired outcomes through their own actions.

Bandura identified four broad sources from which those beliefs can develop: mastery experiences, observing other people, social persuasion and information derived from physiological and emotional states.

Of these, mastery experience — actually attempting something and interpreting the result of your own performance — is generally considered the most influential.

That does not mean every success automatically creates confidence or every failure destroys it. People interpret their experiences differently, and research shows that the relative influence of these sources varies by context, ability, domain and other factors.

But the underlying principle is powerful.

One important way people learn I can handle this is by handling it.

And self-efficacy is not simply a giant psychological tank that fills up whenever we accomplish something.

It is substantially domain-specific.

A teenager can have enormous confidence in her ability to take an exam and very little confidence in her ability to manage a week in which nobody reminds her what needs to happen next.

Those are different histories of experience.

The childhood we learned to optimize

None of this happened because parents suddenly stopped wanting capable children.

Quite the opposite.

In many families, childhood became intensely organized precisely because parents cared so much about their children's futures.

Sociologist Annette Lareau famously described one pattern she observed among middle-class families as concerted cultivation.

In her research, parents deliberately organized activities intended to develop children's talents. They reasoned with them extensively. They intervened with institutions on their behalf and taught them how to communicate with adults and negotiate institutional systems.

Lareau contrasted this with what she termed the accomplishment of natural growth, which she observed more often among working-class and poor families in her study.

The important point is not that one produced capable children and the other did not.

They produced different kinds of experience.

Lareau's work showed real advantages associated with concerted cultivation. Children became practiced at interacting with institutions and adults and learned forms of negotiation that could be useful in schools and other bureaucratic settings.

Economic resources also shape how much choice families have in the first place. A parent with money, flexible time and transportation can construct a childhood differently from a parent working unpredictable hours or managing persistent financial strain.

So this isn't a morality tale about one class of parents doing childhood incorrectly.

But Lareau's research does illuminate something about modern childhood that is easy to overlook:

Time is finite.

An afternoon spent being transported from school to tutoring to soccer practice to music lessons may contain enormous developmental value.

It is also an afternoon that cannot simultaneously be spent figuring out what to do with three unsupervised hours.

Structured achievement and ordinary independence aren't opposites.

But they aren't identical either.

Competence needs somewhere to happen

A second body of research makes the distinction clearer.

Self-determination theory, developed principally by psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan, proposes three basic psychological needs: autonomy, competence and relatedness.

Autonomy here does not mean abandoning children to fend for themselves.

It means experiencing a meaningful sense of volition — feeling that one's actions are, in an important sense, one's own.

Competence refers to experiencing oneself as effective.

Relatedness concerns meaningful connection with other people.

That distinction matters because parental involvement itself is not the problem.

A 2022 second-order meta-analysis by Sungwon Kim synthesized 23 previous meta-analyses covering 1,177 primary studies conducted across roughly half a century. Overall, parental involvement was positively associated with academic achievement, although the relationship varied substantially depending on the kind of involvement being measured.

Parents being involved in children's lives is not some developmental contaminant.

The more useful question is how they are involved.

A large 2025 meta-analysis led by Emma Bradshaw examined 238 samples involving more than 126,000 participants across cultures. Parental autonomy support was positively associated with children's well-being, while psychologically controlling parenting was associated with poorer well-being.

That gives us a much more precise distinction than “parents should back off.”

Children can receive enormous amounts of support while still being given increasing ownership over what they are capable of managing.

The developmental tension appears when support repeatedly becomes substitution.

When helping becomes substitution

This is where research on overparenting becomes particularly interesting.

The term “helicopter parenting” is often used so casually that it can mean almost anything, from calling your college student twice a week to tracking every movement they make.

Research definitions are narrower.

Overparenting generally describes developmentally inappropriate levels of involvement in which parents take responsibility for problems, decisions or tasks that their children are increasingly capable of managing themselves.

Several studies have found associations between this pattern and lower self-efficacy among college students.

In a 2014 study, Jill Bradley-Geist and Julie Olson-Buchanan surveyed 482 undergraduates. Overparenting — unlike parental involvement more generally — was associated with lower self-efficacy and less adaptive responses to hypothetical workplace situations.

A later study by Veronica Darlow, Jill Norvilitis and Pamela Schuetze examined 294 college students. Their model linked helicopter parenting with anxiety, depression, self-efficacy and adjustment to college.

But this is exactly where scientific restraint matters.

These findings do not establish a simple causal chain in which hovering parents manufacture incapable children.

Much of this literature is correlational.

There are several plausible explanations.

Parents might intervene excessively and thereby reduce opportunities for children to practice solving problems.

But parents might also intervene because a child already struggles with anxiety, organization or self-regulation.

Family temperament, economic circumstances and other unmeasured variables might influence both parenting behavior and children's outcomes.

Reality may contain some combination of all three.

The responsible conclusion is therefore narrower than the viral-parenting version:

Overparenting has repeatedly been associated with lower self-efficacy and other difficulties, and there are credible developmental theories explaining why excessive intervention could matter.

That is interesting.

It is not the same as proving causation.

The strange value of the ordinary problem

This brings us back to the empty refrigerator.

Cooking dinner does not magically produce psychological resilience.

Neither does laundry.

There is nothing transformative about detergent.

What makes mundane responsibility developmentally interesting is that ordinary tasks contain tiny problems.

The shirt shrank.

The food burned.

The bus left.

The money didn't last as long as expected.

The appointment was forgotten.

The form was filled out incorrectly.

The first attempt didn't work.

None of these events is particularly serious.

That may be exactly why they are useful.

They provide inexpensive places to encounter the sequence adulthood requires constantly:

notice a problem,

decide what to do,

attempt something,

observe what happened,

adjust,

try again.

A child does not need to be abandoned to experience that sequence.

In fact, autonomy-supportive parenting can provide precisely the opposite environment: safety exists in the background while responsibility gradually moves toward the child.

The parent remains available.

The parent simply does not automatically become the first person to act.

There is an enormous difference between:

“I'll take care of it.”

and:

“What do you think you should do?”

The second sentence contains something the first one doesn't.

Practice.

The missing curriculum of ordinary life

Perhaps this issue feels newly visible because modern childhood has become extraordinarily good at measuring certain forms of development.

We know the grade.

The test score.

The batting average.

The ranking.

The acceptance letter.

The certificate.

Ordinary competence produces much less documentation.

Nobody receives a trophy for noticing that the trash needs to go out.

There is no admissions category for being able to feed yourself for a week without spending $200.

No one puts “can call the dentist without emotional preparation” under extracurricular activities.

And yet adulthood consists disproportionately of exactly these uncelebrated acts.

Perhaps that is why achievement and competence are so easy to confuse.

Achievement announces itself.

Competence often looks like nothing happened.

The bill was paid.

The food was purchased.

The problem was handled.

The person figured it out.

Adulthood doesn't arrive all at once

There is another reason not to turn this discussion into panic about unprepared 18-year-olds.

Development doesn't end on move-in day.

Psychologist Jeffrey Arnett introduced the concept of emerging adulthood to describe the period from the late teens through the twenties, focusing especially in his original formulation on roughly ages 18 to 25.

For many young people in industrialized societies, the transition into adult roles has become extended.

They explore identities, move between living arrangements, change relationships and occupations, and frequently describe themselves as neither adolescents nor completely adult.

That longer runway means an 18-year-old who cannot cook is not a failed developmental project.

They can learn.

They probably will.

The more interesting question is not whether every practical skill has been mastered before a young person leaves home.

It is whether they have begun acquiring experience with being the person responsible for figuring things out.

Because the transferable skill underneath cooking, laundry, budgeting and appointments isn't domestic perfection.

It is agency.

The goal isn't less parenting

There is an appealing but dangerous conclusion available here:

Parents should simply do less.

The research doesn't justify it.

Children need protection.

They need instruction.

They need emotional security.

They need adults who notice when a problem is larger than they can reasonably manage.

They also differ enormously in temperament, developmental needs, disability, circumstances and maturity. Responsibility appropriate for one 14-year-old may be completely inappropriate for another.

The better principle is not withdrawal.

It is gradual transfer.

Early in childhood, the adult does nearly everything.

Then the child helps.

Then the child tries while the adult watches.

Then the child tries and asks for help when necessary.

Eventually, the child simply handles it.

That progression preserves support while allowing competence to acquire something it cannot receive secondhand:

evidence.

Evidence that I encountered something I didn't immediately know how to do, and I figured out what happened next.

That may be one of the quietest developmental gifts a parent can give.

Not removing every obstacle.

Not manufacturing unnecessary hardship either.

Simply recognizing that some manageable obstacles are not interruptions in a child's development.

They are the development.

The washing machine was never the real problem.

The real question is how many chances a young person has had to face an ordinary problem knowing that, this time, nobody has already solved it for them.

References

Arnett, J. J. (2000). Emerging adulthood: A theory of development from the late teens through the twenties. American Psychologist, 55(5), 469–480. https://doi.org/10.1037/0003-066X.55.5.469

Bradley-Geist, J. C., & Olson-Buchanan, J. B. (2014). Helicopter parents: An examination of the correlates of over-parenting of college students. Education + Training, 56(4), 314–328. https://doi.org/10.1108/ET-10-2012-0096

Bradshaw, E. L., Duineveld, J. J., Conigrave, J. H., Steward, B. A., Ferber, K. A., Joussemet, M., Parker, P. D., & Ryan, R. M. (2025). Disentangling autonomy-supportive and psychologically controlling parenting: A meta-analysis of self-determination theory's dual process model across cultures. American Psychologist, 80(6), 879–895. https://doi.org/10.1037/amp0001389

Darlow, V., Norvilitis, J. M., & Schuetze, P. (2017). The relationship between helicopter parenting and adjustment to college. Journal of Child and Family Studies, 26, 2291–2298. https://doi.org/10.1007/s10826-017-0751-3

Kim, S. (2022). Fifty years of parental involvement and achievement research: A second-order meta-analysis. Educational Research Review, 37, 100463. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.edurev.2022.100463

Lareau, A. (2011). Unequal Childhoods: Class, Race, and Family Life (2nd ed.). University of California Press.

Usher, E. L., & Pajares, F. (2008). Sources of self-efficacy in school: Critical review of the literature and future directions. Review of Educational Research, 78(4), 751–796. https://doi.org/10.3102/0034654308321456