Do kids still clean up on Saturday mornings while old-school jams play in the background? A Black cultural inquiry.

Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.

I think I’m the only person I’ve ever met who knows of the group Kiara, an R&B duo from Detroit. My father bought their sophomore album, “Civilized Rogue,” which featured the song “You’re Right About That” — as ’90s of a song and video as you will ever hear and see. I don’t know if this is true or not (and I’m not sure my family could even verify this as a fact) but I feel like I heard “You’re Right About That” over and over again on Saturday mornings, likely in 1990, as we straightened up our rooms and cleaned whatever other thing that kids were required to clean up on weekends back then. While that song doesn’t exist to most people, it is a reminder of my childhood and part of the soundtrack to my young, Black, Saturday morning life. 

That day was also filled with Luther Vandross and Kenny G and Rod Stewart. Oh, and Hall & Oates. Saturday mornings had jams while we did menial tasks. According to every Black person I know, this same pattern happened in Black households across America and for those of us who were in military families, abroad. The extent to which actual cleaning happened is debatable; my parents said we only had to clean up our rooms on weekends, which makes sense — in 1990 I turned 11, and I have no idea how good I was at anything at that point. 

I now have four kids of my own, and the music doesn’t really play on Saturday mornings. Sure, there have been a few weekends where I’ve woken up the house with the sounds of ’80s R&B or Fela Kuti, but typically my kids don’t wake up on Saturday and think about straightening up their rooms or the bathroom or the living room. In fact, they don’t really think about that on most days unless I tell them to do something specifically. It’s not because I’ve lost some value system that gave me core memories about random R&B duos, it’s largely because nobody is home on Saturday mornings in my house. The way our lives are set up, my kids can get home super late on any given day making it impossible to focus on any particular chore. Every weekend is filled with activities of some sort, shepherding the kids from one sporting event or birthday party to another. It seems to mirror the lives of most of my friends. My kids simply don’t have the time for it anymore. 

Lifestyle

Obviously, that’s a personal thing; my kids are into lots of things, and we know lots of people so it stands to reason that the Saturday morning of my youth can’t quite exist like it used to. I feel like I knew lots of people as a kid, and I definitely played sports, but I have so many memories of me playing outside with my friends all the time. I feel like I had all of the time in the world and thus my parents could expect much more in the way of chores and things. My kids have chores, too, but I’d be lying if I said they were very time-consuming. 

Part of me wants to give my kid that same life I had; I turned out alright so it seems like the things that I remember fondly contributed to that. But I also wonder if that memory is a relic of a time past. Similarly, I wonder if I’m over-remembering this facet of life; I actually had to ask my parents if we cleaned up on Saturdays because the culture has made this a staple part of life for those of us who grew up in the ’80s and ’90s, but there have been more than a few things that live stronger in cultural memory than actuality. If you let social media tell it, everybody my age woke up at 8 a.m. on Saturday to the sounds of Aretha Franklin while wearing a bandana and cleaning the house from top to bottom. Maybe that was somebody’s life but it definitely wasn’t mine. At least not often enough for it to be part of my youth identity. 

Here’s the thing, though. For some folks maybe that was life, and I wonder if that’s a time-honored tradition that continues to this day. Amongst my friends, it seems like none of us have the time to throw on the Bluetooth speaker and fire up a “Cleaning Music” playlist, and we smile as a household as the smell of Fabuloso takes us away into a spick-and-span house. Also, I was today-years-old when I learned that there was a brand named Spic and Span. I never understood that phrase before today. 

Anyway, are families still waking up on Saturdays and putting the kids to work while Babyface or perhaps SWV or Usher jams in the background? It seems like such a cool, simple aspect of life that creates bonds and memories for the house. I’d love to try to bring that old thing back, but even now I have to leave to cart one kid across the city to another thing before I pick up another kid. Who has time for family cleaning when everybody has somewhere to be all of the time? 

Am I alone? 

Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).