A NON-LINEAR GROUP OF THOUGHTS ON CHORES FOR KIDS (Part 3 & final)

Hmm, what else?

• Ages 10 – 12 will include a chore for ‘help with dinner’; by 13 that just becomes something that’s expected rather than a chore per se.
• Even at 14, sometimes they still need coaching through the chores, though much less often and usually only when they’re having a bad brain day.
• If your kids have lots of co-curricular activities, it’s obviously not possible for them to do this many chores. They are growing and learning and developing; their minds need down time.
• The above represents an ideal, not what happens daily; some days I don’t have it in me to supervise, and/or they don’t have it in them to focus, in which case ‘chores’ becomes something more like dishwasher and pets only, or dishwasher, pets and one other chore each.
• I make liberal use of my Household Admin powers to swap around chores – for ones that more urgently need doing, or ones that are better suited to their tastes, or to reduce the number of tasks. They love knowing that I’ve done this; it makes any chore list feel like a win because they know I’ve personalised it to them and to the day. And I can personalise it according to the degree of supervision/argumentation I have in me on any given day 😛
• Speed-running the chores tends to work for the elder child: he’ll get them all done in like 30 mins if he has a playdate to game online with his friends.
• That said, he’s also the most likely to do zero chores on a bad day; I think there just has to be some real-life flexibility around this – especially as kids approach teenagehood, the question always present in the back of my mind is ‘Would I expect this from an adult?’ I’m certainly not consistent every day, and I definitely do less on a bad day, so it’s important to make the same space for kids.
• Note that my kids have never gotten rewards for doing chores; we’ve talked about the fact that it’s just part and parcel of being a family, living in a shared house, and being a community: we all pitch in because that’s what’s fair.
• They do get fortnightly(ish, very ish) pocket money, and understand that that’s a degree of compensation for being an active member of the family community, but it’s definitely not in a quantifiable relationship to ‘amount of chores completed’.
• And they do often have to get chores done before they’re allowed on screens or whatnot in the afternoons, with a bit of flexibility around having snack time before chores some days if they come home ravenously hungry.

All in all, it’s taken A LOT of mental effort to get my kids to the point where they can get home and I can just say ‘chores are in the app’ and they do them, but OMG is it worth it at this end. Most adults are astonished when I tell them what my kids do around the house, and although they are 11 and 14, in an emergency they could absolutely run the house quite competently if they had to, including meals. They might end up sleeping on the same sheets for a year, but they’d survive with at least adequate hygiene and an adequately tidy house :’D

It’s also taught them a lot about relationships. “Yes, he gets more pocket money than you, but he also does more chores.” “Yes, she has fewer chores than you but did you know she’s still actually doing more than you did at her age?” “Okay, everything sucks, we’re all a mess, chores are cancelled for today.” “Ooo, let’s do a challenge and see if we can get the entire room green on the app today!” These sorts of things involve teamwork, learning to accurately assess others’ capacity and your own and adjust accordingly, understanding the root purpose of goals, etc etc etc. Not least, they are both vocally aware that they need to pick life partners that are NOT like their sibling if they want a happy, fulfilling long-term relationship, and are quite happy to outline for you why that is :’D rofl.

So yeah. Kids doing chores. Any questions?

And is anyone interested in a follow-up on the same sort of thing but for cooking skills? My son’s friends always found it so weird-in-a-good-way that playdates with him would often end up with them and him in the kitchen baking themselves a treat without my direct supervision 😀 “You mean we can just… bake ourselves some cookies??!” Yes love, yes you can.