A NON-LINEAR GROUP OF THOUGHTS ON CHORES FOR KIDS (Part 1)

This is a generalised response to a specific question I was asked yesterday, namely, “How do I get my kids to do chores without all of us but especially me having a breakdown?” My response ran long (we are shocked) so I figured I’d share publicly in case it’s useful for anyone else – except I’ve broken it up into 3 parts so you’re not overwhelmed by a deluge 😀 To make sure you don’t miss parts 2 and 3, make sure you sign up to get blog posts (and nothing else, not even the newsletter) in your inbox whenever I publish them!

Okay, so first of all, they have only JUST started being able to do chores without 5-minutely reminders and constant supervision, like, in the last couple of months, and they have about 10 and 7 years’ respectively practice doing chores. It takes A LONG TIME for these things to start to automate and partly you just have to realise you’re in it for the long haul here.

Try not to schedule things for yourself during the hour they are doing chores. You’re going to be supervising them, and that is your job for that hour. It feels stupidly inefficient to begin with, but you ARE doing something, you’re actively training – you wouldn’t call that nothing or a waste of time if you were getting paid to train someone in a work context, so don’t do it here either. You’re working. Don’t increase your stress and frustration about a thing that is already incredibly stressful and frustrating by trying to give yourself a goal to meet at the same time.

It’s both okay and necessary to scale the amount of chore-doing for the ages. The eldest will get annoyed. That’s life, and much as they hate it, they can and do understand (when you explain to them) that a) younger siblings don’t have as much capacity, b) younger siblings don’t get as many privileges, and c) they certainly weren’t doing the amount of chores they are now when they were their younger sibling’s age.

4 – 6 years, you’ve got like 10 – 15 mins of attention capacity, MAX. Literally all my kids did at this age was get their lunchbox from their bag and take it to the kitchen, dump their schoolbag in their room (not even in a specific place, that was too much to ask, ha), and put away clean cutlery & utensils from the dishwasher. Maybe occasionally they’d do ad hoc stuff like help put groceries away (just the pantry stuff, or just the fridge stuff – some sort of category that’s small and manageable, doesn’t require them to make micro-decisions about where each item goes because they all go in the same spot, but that DOES have a kind of ‘treasure hunt’ feel in terms of finding all the right items in the grocery bags). One kid LOVES doing the toilets, so I taught her to wash the toilet bowl at this age; likewise, she learned at age 2 how to put a simple load of laundry on because: reasons, so if it was a good day and everyone was calm and capable, I might get her to run a load for me as well as the above.

7 – 9 years I used a chore chart. It looked like it had a lot of items on it, but I’d broken everything down into tiny steps; this was mostly an attempt to get them to establish an afternoon routine, rather than about getting them to ‘do chores’. So, when they walked in the door from school, what needed to happen? Shoes away. Uniforms into the laundry. Lunchbox on the bench, and repack it for tomorrow*. Any specialty equipment they needed for the following day put into their bag. Unload dishwasher fully at this point. And then just a couple of household chores that weren’t a daily thing, allowing some flexibility for good days/bad days and tailored to chores they personally found easy, anything from checking on pets to running a load of laundry (including uniforms), watering plants, cleaning a toilet, taking out a rubbish or recycling bin, or vacuuming their room – just one or two, scheduled for good days. This part is more about skills acquisition and exposure than actually “Doing Chores”.

* A word on lunches: From the start, we’ve done an easy system of a fruit, a vegetable, a protein (often a yogurt pouch) and a main/carb (eg sandwich). Apart from spreading things on a sandwich, which can be trickier, they’ve always been responsible for gathering at least the fruit, veg and protein, putting into their lunchbox, and popping the lunchbox into the fridge ready for the next day. Easier for me, and more buy-in for them, which means they’re more likely to actually eat the food, because they chose it!