I was the kid, so it was required of me to have "chores" too. Like scrubbing built up grime from the kitchen floor with my bare knuckles when we have brushes and cleaning my 5 year old brother's literal crap from my bedroom floor and picking up the avalanche piles when they fall from my mom's hoarding or like staying up all night and cleaning the whole house the night before we hear child protective services are coming in the morning. I owed them these chores but I wasn't owed anything, my mom was cut open for me so it was the least I could do in their eyes. They picked up free presents from giveaways for Christmas I should be grateful right? I shouldn't cry, I should just shut up and wait patiently for my one meal at 2:30am. Im with op on this owing system. Maybe normal chores are good for a child, but I saw the extreme of that way of thinking. If I had kids if I made them have chores I wouldn't make them feel like they owed it to me, id offer to pay them to do stuff like wash the car or mow the lawn, teach them a work ethic and how to value their own work. All my parents ended up teaching me was to let people overwork and abuse me for basically zero pay because "it's the right thing to do". People outside of my family have had to tell me it's ok not to do things for people if they ask me to. I was trained to always do as I was told so it was hard to break out of that as an adult. To be clear, I'm not arguing with what you are saying, I'm just showing how a chore system can be abused and used to manipulate and control. I was basically a child slave. I'm 23 now.