Research on children’s housework participation is scarce and mainly descriptive. Our aim is to identify how gender roles are socialized; in particular how children’s involvement in housework is shaped by parental distribution of domestic tasks in childhood. We use data from the German Socio-Economic Household Panel, which includes annual information on housework time dedication of all family members. We analyze a sample of 2288 boys and girls, born between 1976 and 1995, who live with their parents at age 18-19 and whose parents reported the time they spent on housework when the children were 8-11 years old. We find that parents' division of housework at age 8-11 affects boys’ (and less so, girls') likelihood of participating in such tasks, even after controlling for parental education, the mother’s work attachment, time constraints, and parents’ division of housework in adolescence. The analysis of siblings (with family fixed-effects) lends additional support for our hypothesis.