Every once in a while I wind up at a party with a certain couple--let's call them the Perkettes--who have two industrious, well-behaved sons. Mr. and Mrs. Perkette tell me all about how the boys, ages four and six, make their beds, empty the dishwasher, set the dinner table and clear the dishes. You get the feeling they have to tie the boys to the kitchen chairs to keep them from leaping up and scouring the oven.

"How do you get them to do this stuff?" I ask wanly. If I told my son Joey, age seven, to clear the dishes, he would contact Amnesty International.

"Oh," says Mr. Perkette, "they're happy to do it."

"They don't stall? They don't whine? They don't hire a lawyer and seek to have your parental status terminated?" I ask.

"No!" says Mr. Perkette, beaming broadly. "If they do their chores, they get to have their favorite treat of the week."

"Yes?"

"They get," and here Mr. Perkette lights up at the very thought of his own expansiveness, "to watch a television show."

"Those jackanapes!" I gasp.

"The one they like to watch is DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN," he says.

"Do you think that's wise?" I ask with grave concern.

Meanwhile, my son is at home, having talked the baby-sitter into watching I WALKED WITH A ZOMBIE. He would regard DR. QUINN, MEDICINE WOMAN as some kind of terrible punishment.

I find myself kind of hoping the Perkettes are telling the truth about their boys. If there are small children unloading the dishwasher somewhere in this world, maybe my son will, too. I also find myself hoping they are lying through their teeth, because that would diminish my whopping sense of failure as a parent.

Joey is a decent kid. Ask him to set the table if he's standing there, and he will. Ask him to drag in the garbage cans from the curb, and he'll do it, no problem. My father has been seriously ill for a year, and when Joey and my mother take him to the park, Joey knocks himself out keeping his grandfather on his feet and helping him on and off the park benches. But he won't report for duty on a regular basis. It has to be spontaneous. Confronted with a new rule or system, he will spend more time asking detailed, lawyerly questions about it than he would have used if he had simply complied.

It's entirely possible that his mother and I are the lazy ones. It had always been easier to do things ourselves than to teach Joey the importance and, in some cases, the joy of making a contribution. Still, the situation was starting to bother me--and not just because his room was a mess. Should I care if my child doesn't do chores on a regular basis?

"Yes," says Jane Nelsen, a family therapist in Sacramento, California, and author of several child-rearing books, including POSITIVE DISCIPLINE (Ballantine Books, 1996). "If you don't teach them to take care of themselves now, what kind of people are they going to be down the road?" She, along with several other child-rearing experts, told me that helping out around the house lets kids experience feelings of competence and what it means to belong to a family. "Kids are always making decisions about themselves," Nelsen says. And pitching in makes them feel good about who they are.

Clearly it was time to get Joey to start taking his chores more seriously--but how? I put that question to friends with industrious children. And as I listened, I got a terrible sinking sensation. Or, more accurately, a sensation of having already sunk. Many of the children were working like plow horses for such rewards as an ice-cream sundae or a movie ticket. My son regards these as a matter of birthright. But the families who were most successful had told their children at very early ages--well under seven, anyway--that they were expected to do certain things just because they're part of the family. No games, no incentives, no stickers, no stars.

I also learned that people have very different expectations. My friend Alison Schwartz of Bloomfield, Connecticut, said almost apologetically that she doesn't have any clever incentive plans, but then "my son probably doesn't do as much as Joey does." Well, it turns out that Alex, all of nine, makes his bed, cleans his room, takes out the garbage cans, manages the recycling and even separates his laundry by color--something many 47-year-old men never master. He does this not for any reward but because he's expected to.

On the other end of the spectrum I offer you The Most Horrifying Story of a Child Estranged from Household Work. This was told to me secondhand, but the teller swears it was true. And, if you're like me, it will make you feel better about your own situation.

A teacher in her 20s went back to live at her parents' house so her 14-year-old brother wouldn't be alone while they were away. Halfway through the week, the young man came to her and explained earnestly that the laundry seemed to be broken.

"How so?" she asked.

"Well," he said, "usually I put my clothes down this chute, and a couple of days later they come back in my drawer. But now it's broken or something."

It's not as impossible as it sounds. With a renewed sense of urgency, I decided to see whether any of the strategies recommended by friends would work with Joey, who is currently in negotiations with the National Institutes of Health to see if he is entitled to any protection as a lab animal.