Competence is built from repeated real responsibility with real consequences. A child who cooks a meal the family actually eats learns sequencing, timing, budgeting, and what good enough looks like. But the skill is not really the point. The point is identity: a child who contributes concludes that they are a contributor, and that conclusion follows them into school, into work, and eventually into a home of their own.

So make chores structural rather than disciplinary. If work only ever appears as punishment, a child learns that labour is what happens to people who misbehaved. Give each child a standing responsibility that belongs to them by name, rotate them each term so nobody is trapped in the worst one, and accept that early attempts will be worse than yours. The badly swept floor is tuition, and redoing it in front of them is a refund you cannot afford.

This lands in a particular way here. Households with domestic staff routinely produce eighteen-year-olds who cannot run their own lives, and a student in Leeds or Nsukka who can cook is better off than one who cannot - in money, health and confidence. Where there is help in the house, give the children their own duties anyway, and require courtesy towards the staff. Spread it across gender too: a son who cannot cook and a daughter who cannot change a tyre are both short-changed.