Leading A Horse to Water… How to Get Your Kids to Complete Chores
APR
9
2008
Having a hard time getting your kids to complete chores? Nobody likes to complete chores, mom included, but nobody likes to have to coerce their children into completing them either!
In today’s world, many families have schedules that are so busy that it can be difficult to teach your child/children to complete required tasks and to enforce them as well!
With my first child, I started early when he was a young toddler. He was expected to clean up his toys when finished playing. As I sang the “Barney” clean up song, I would help him to put away his toys, thus modeling for him the expected behavior. As he got older, so did his chore list, and I used a chore chart. This was like a checklist so that he could track his progress, and it also served as a daily reminder for him, which prevented me from having to nag! If he did his chores, all was well; if he did not do them, then he had extra duties assigned. I did not link allowance to the chores because I wanted him to learn that part of being a family is that we all pitch in to help with the household responsibilities.
At the start of the preteen years, I would give him the opportunity to earn money if he completed extra chores for me. This worked well especially in the summer when he was home from school and had extra time. Sometimes as a reward for especially good behavior, I would do his chores for the day! That was a real incentive for him to be on his best behavior!
Now that I have two toddlers, I am starting over with learning how to teach my boys how to cheerfully and obediently complete their chores. I found a really neat website: http://www.homeorganizeit.com that has a wealth of information for organizing your home. It also includes a section on how to get your kids to happily do chores! Here are some of their suggestions:
* Clearly set the expectations. For example, the kids in my house know that they are expected to make their bed right after breakfast.
*Start early with setting up cleaning routines with young children. For me, it was sometimes easier to clean up myself, especially when I had just one child, but this does not help the child to learn how to be responsible! Now that I have (4) children, it is critical that each child pitch in. For my 28 month old, one of our routines is that all toys are cleaned up before heading up to bed.
*Give clear instructions and break large tasks into smaller chunks. For example, I may expect my son to clean his room. If it is a big mess (which it usually is!), I may say, “Today I want you to put all the clothes on the floor away and dust the furniture”. Tomorrow he may be expected to vacuum and bring down his laundry. With older kids, you can set a timer for 15 minutes and have them clean up as much possible. When the timer goes off, they are finished with that task until the next time. I also will set the timer for younger children; they love to see if they can “beat the timer” and get all their toys put away before the timer goes off!
*Make Chores fun! The above timer idea makes doing work fun! The other thing that I did with older kids was to write specific task on a slip of paper. I then put them into basket and each child would select 2-3 slips of paper out of the basket. These were their assigned chores for the day. They liked the unexpected, and the chance that they may select an easy chore. My son and step-daughter also would trade chores too. If one got a chore they didn’t like, I would allow them to swap.
Chore charts help to keep you and your kids organized, on track, and to be responsible. You can use stickers with younger kids, and just a check mark with older kids. Here are a few sites that have chore charts for you to use!
*www.handipoints.com
*www.FreebehaviorCharts.com
There are many more ideas at homeorganizeit.com!
