Today Angi from the Schneider Peeps is sharing with us some great tips on helping our young children learn to do chores. It’s so great to have a mom with experience teach us! Angi just came out with a new eBook called Taming the Laundry Monster. I just read it!
It has a great way to help get all the laundry done when you have older kids who are capable of helping out. She also has great laundry tips and tricks and a recipe for laundry soap which is great for anyone no matter what stage of life you’re in! And this eBook is on sale for $.99! All you have to do is use this code just for my readers: LEARN. And now for Angi’s tips!
When Alexis asked me to write a guest post about children and chores I knew what I would have wanted an older mom to say to me 15 years ago when my 3rd child in 3 years was born.
“One day, your children will be more of a help than just a ‘helper’”.
As a mom of preteens and teenagers (and a 4 year old), I’m here to tell you that one day your children will be amazingly capable. But that doesn’t happen overnight and they don’t just magically mature into it. It’s the day by day training and encouraging that will make that happen.
I truly believe that every child wants to feel like he contributes to the family. And there are many ways that even the youngest child can contribute.
What I want to share with you is how to manage the younger years so that when your children are older they not only know how to work but also enjoy working.
~ Include your child in your work even when they’re not very helpful just yet.
If you have little ones it’s super easy to try to save all the cleaning for when they’re napping or distracted by playing. I want to encourage you to not do that. If you’re folding clothes, give them a few items to fold and resist the urge to refold them. If you’re cleaning the bathroom, give them a baby wipe and let them wipe the walls, floors, whatever they want. Bring a stool into your kitchen and allow your children to be beside you when you cook or wash dishes. This really won’t slow you down much in your work, but it will go very far in teaching your children that a clean house and good meals don’t just happen.
~Your own attitude towards work will have more of an impact on your children than anything else. If you rush through your work, complaining and frustrated, you children will learn that work is something to be avoided and dreaded. And they will become very creative at avoiding work at all costs.
~If chore charts work for you, then use them. If they don’t work for you, then don’t use them. Chore charts works very, very well for some families. The children like checking off squares or putting stickers on the chart and, more importantly, mom likes or at least can remember to check off squares or give stickers. I’m not the most disciplined person in the world and so charts would work for about 2 days for me. At some point I just decided to no longer worry about rewarding with stickers or treats every job my child did, after all I don’t get an arbitrary reward for the work I do. Sometimes, the work is the reward. For instance, the reward for washing dishes is having clean dishes to eat off of.
~Develop teamwork within your family. One of the unexpected blessings of having my older children so close together is that I soon realized that there is no way I can do everything that needed to be done for our family by myself. We need to work as a team. Let me let you in on a little secret, “Fair doesn’t mean equal.” There’s no way we can divide up the work that needs to be done at our home equally, but that doesn’t mean that it’s not fair. Sometimes, one or two children are home and dinner needs to be cooked so guess who gets to cook dinner that night? Or a couple of children are at camp for a week, their work doesn’t go undone, the rest of us pick up the slack
~Help your children become responsible for their own things early. That means they pick up their own toys. If they make a mess, they clean it up. Since they sleep in their own beds, they make up their own
beds. If you have really small children, an easy way to teach them to make their bed (if their bed is against a wall) is to line up the comforter with the wall and tuck the other side and the side by the foot board in. Teach them to get in and out of the side by the wall. In the morning it’s super easy to just line the comforter up along the wall again.
~As your children get older you can assign them responsibilities. But don’t wear them out (especially your oldest ones) with too many. While I don’t have chore charts, my children do have specific responsibilities they are to do. I have them on a list on the refrigerator. Their responsibilities are
pretty much the same, their rooms, their laundry, a specific portion of the main bathroom and either a kitchen or a living room responsibility….and, “whatever mom says.” I know some families rotate jobs so that each child gets good at each job. I’ve found that since we’ve included our kids in our work from the beginning they pretty much know how to do household jobs, or at least can figure it out.
~Sometimes, you need to have high goals but low expectations. If you’ve not ever felt totally frustrated with your child then you just haven’t been a mom long enough. I don’t know any mom who has never been frustrated with their children for not doing the things they know to do. Years ago, after experiencing way
too many frustrated moments, I decided to lower my expectations…not my goals…and it has really helped me with my frustration. Here’s how it works. I have a goal of all of my children getting up in the morning, making their beds, brushing their teeth and getting dressed. A pretty reasonable goal, yes? For some reason having 5 children in 8 years just threw me for a loop and when one of my older children, who could do these things, didn’t, it just about made my head spin. So I decided to lower my expectations. When I would ask, “Did you do these things?” and they said, ”No” I no longer would get frustrated because I expected that that they would need to be reminded. If they said, “yes”, it was a bonus. No more need to be frustrated. And eventually they all learned to do this without reminders.
Each family is unique and each child is different, what works beautifully for one family could be a total disaster for another family. And just because my four year old can fold the dish rags doesn’t mean that every 4 year old can or should. You, the mom, will need to really be intentional about what chores you give your children and how you work that out in your family.
Try new things and if they work, keep them and if they don’t, get rid of them.
After all, the goal isn’t to list off all the chores you child can do and at what age.
The real goal is to have children who can and will work and who grow up to be very capable adults.
Angi Schneider is a minister’s wife and homeschooling mom to 5 children and 1 adult child. She and her family have a small homestead where they garden, raise chickens and bees and blog about their adventures at SchneiderPeeps. Angi is also the author of the new ebook series, The Busy Moms Guide, and the first ebook in that series, Taming the Laundry Monster is now available.