Chores are really important for:
- Teaching health and hygiene skills
- Training in employable skills
- Building self-efficacy, which contributes to self-esteem (“I can do good things!”)
Giving children an opportunity to do something helpful after they’ve done something disrespectful
But making kids do chores is work. It is not free labor for parents, contrary to the child’s perspective.
I cannot even begin to count how many chores I got out of as a kid! Nor can I tell you ALL the different systems my busy parents devised to get us to do our chores. The first was being bribed to receive a dollar each week if I made my bed every day. Unfortunately, I really didn’t care whether or not my bed was made and I didn’t even care about money. I’m pretty sure I never earned even one dollar. As penance for years of not doing chores my job “just happens” to include teaching children and families forevermore how to do chores and enforcing that the tasks be completed well. Oh the irony!
Here’s a tip from a family who has not one but FOUR children with RAD!
Each room of the house has a posted placard of cleaning procedures. The plastic holder is mounted on the wall with a paper slipped inside. (I do not recommend the standing holders as they have to be moved to clean that surface and can be thrown or hidden. Attaching it to the wall is better.) Staples offers this product in a full page version as well as other sizes for about $6 each.
When a child is assigned to clean a room or you’re trying to figure out a restitution for him, just look at the placard. These lists take the needless guesswork and memory work out of chores. Just spell it out and post it.
Notice the different categories this family identified: daily tasks, mid-week tasks, and Saturday tasks.
Now notice the first item on the Mid-Week lists: “All daily tasks plus...” This means there’s no room for “Oh, I forgot...I didn’t know...I didn’t realize you wanted me to...I don’t usually...Well, you never had me do that before...”
And again, notice the first item on the Saturday List: “All daily and mid-week tasks plus...” Yep, still no room for “I didn’t know”.
If you wanted to take it up another notch, you could put a colored sticker on your cleaning spray bottles. For instance, a pink sticker on glass cleaner, green on multi-purpose cleaner, yellow on floor cleaner. (Garage sale stickers in the “office supply aisle” at the grocery store work well for this.) Then color code each task to its bottle. For instance, “Clean Mirror” would be printed in pink ink OR marked with a pink highlighter to denote that the child should use the bottle with the pink sticker for that task. Find them at WalMart for $1. (If only I’d made my bed...haha.)
The task list can be handwritten on a plain piece of paper– no plastic cover necessary.
Be sure to keep a copy on hand in case your paper list “happens to” get ruined or disappear. This is another reason why typing and printing the list is preferred to handwriting the list. If you hand write the list, then take a photo of it so that Sweetie Pie can recreate the list using that photo if/when needed.
Aw, Mom, you think of everything!
But if you want a plastic cover, here are two more options.
And lastly, you could put your list inside a plastic sheet protector (www.staples.com) and hang it on the wall with a 3M strip.
Three cheers for not repeating instructions day after day! ☺