AIBU household chores

[user1471451684]

We live in the US, in a small village, we use wood to heat the house and water, we need between 4-6 trees a year to fuel the house. my DS (14) does not have many chores around the house. My DH believes it's time that he steps up his role in the house so my DH suggested that his chore should be to cut and split the firewood. It's a labor intensive task, which DS has been helping with for the last couple years learning to use the chainsaw etc. AIBU to think he is too young for this? To be fair my DS is a mature kid, he has hunted deer and turkey since the age of 12 with me and DH and I am happy to let him out with a rifle but the chainsaw I don't like. My DH is responsible and for the past few years whenever the car needs fixing or the washing machine needs fixing DS has been his helper. So he knows what to do. Now when things need fixing my DH just tells DS you have watched me do it enough times, you get on with it and call me if there is a problem.

Chainsaw unsupervised? No chance.

Three stages:

Watch me do.
Do as I watch.
Complete independently.

I think they are at stage 2 from your post, not stage 3.

Why can't he do the dishes or sort the laundry?

Thanks for the input, dishes and laundry are a shared chore, So he already helps out there, he likes to be outside

There's a lot to be said for promoting independence, but I just think he's got ahead of himself by a few years.

I'd be thankful he's sharing his skills, and let him know that. But I'd also encourage him to go back a step in terms of supervision, the stakes are too high with the tasks we are talking about.

You must be aware of how unusual it is in the UK to have a young teenager using a gun and a chainsaw. So post on a UK based parenting website and you're not going to find many people with experience of the right age for a teenager to use a chainsaw.

We heat our house with wood and my ten year old helps with the process, has done for a couple of years, but not with the actual chainsawing.

How big is he? How big is the chainsaw?

DP uses them at work, and it's not something for anyone less than peak physical strength. You can kill yourself if you lose control over it.

Just say no TBH. Better safe than sorry. It really doesn't compare to hanging out the washing or even chopping firewood.

What's it like to hunt a turkey? What sort of gun do you use? Do they ever turn nasty and attack you before you can kill them?

Turkey are hunted with a shotgun, they are harmless to you but very intelligent so you have to hide

Hmmm.. I was allowed guns at 10 under supervision , totally unsupervised at 14 and could drive on our land unsupervised too but the chainsaw came later.

The trouble is controlling it if you hit something and it springs back up at you or the chain snaps or something like that. Has he got the experience (and physical strength) to control it and prevent serious injury?

I don't know many 14 year olds who would.

Too early imo ( and it's not often I say that).

I love your uniting culture in the US , I have friends over there and regularly come over to hunt .
I love hunting and just going out in the wilds for days on end. We just don't have the land you do over there, even in the remotest parts of the U.K. You are never more than a few miles from a town of some sort. You have truly wild places!

It depends in part on how much he weighs and what his upper body and core strength is like. I grew up in rural Australia. Learned to drive and to shoot a light rifle at about 8 yo and was hunting pigs with sole control of a semiautomatic rifle at about 14 (this was before the gun recall occasioned by the Port Arthur massacre). Dad let us do a load of v dangerous stuff but as I was a skinny girl he wouldn't let me use a chainsaw for safety reasons.

Thanks everyone for the valuable input, he is a big boy for his age....but we are a smaller family, maybe a few more supervised times with the chainsaw, the compromise Ibwill make with my DH is that he cuts and DS splits and stacks it