Household Chores Essay - Advantages & Disadvantages
Discuss the advantages and disadvantages of both, and give your own opinion.
Give reasons for your answer and include any relevant examples from your own knowledge or experience.
Household Chores Essay Answer
Housework is a necessary evil. Few individuals enjoy doing such tasks; however, they must be done for the benefit of all living in the household. Whether such tasks are best done by hand or with the assistance of machines is debatable. In many cases, it will depend on the circumstances of each household.
Traditionally, housework was very much a manual, physical activity. From sweeping to doing laundry and cleaning and polishing furniture in the home, it required a good deal of elbow grease and time. It was part and parcel of a domestic duties; organizing the home, maintaining it clean and orderly, and attending to the family's needs.
As more and more women entered the workforce and technology developed, the need to complete such tasks more efficiently became a priority. Women, in particular, had less time to devote to running the household due to pressures of work, and therefore many domestic appliances such as automatic washers and dryers, vacuum cleaners, and others quickly became common household items, allowing cleaning and other household chores to be completed extremely quickly and easily.
The advantages of traditional manual household chores include a greater degree of regular physical activity, being less expensive, and typically more environmentally friendly. The disadvantages include the fact that it is arduous work, time-consuming and extremely mundane, and repetitive.
The use of machines and other aids to do housework offers the advantages of saving time and requiring less physical effort and energy. On the other hand, such domestic appliances cost a lot more to buy and run, resulting in greater energy consumption per household. This affects natural resources and emissions in terms of the additional energy production required.
Undoubtedly, modern machines and appliances in the home nowadays are irreplaceable. Virtually nobody can dedicate the amount of time that our grandparents did to housework due to the pressures of work and other family commitments. Life is not as simple as it was when most housework was done manually.