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Let's talk Chores and Responsibilities!
A family lives together, and a family should work
together. Just as it is important to
work with your partner to parent your children, everyone should also be on the
same page with it comes to chores and responsibilities.
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| Cheerio Champ painted our tissue box chore towers. Just add hooks. The chores are written on scrapbook paper rectangles with holes punched in them. When not in use for the day, store extra cards in box. |
Our family has the chore tower. Each day’s chores are represented
clearly. When they are finished, they
are flipped over to display the back of the card. Obviously, for the adults of the house, we
have no rewards for completing them other than having a clean house and
bragging rights. Cheerio Champ, on the
other hand, gets a special privilege. He
gets to play his LeapPad2 during quiet time.
If he point blank refuses to do chores, he earns himself a nap during
quiet time. That’s enough incentive for
him. We played around with a lot of
other ideas, including allowance, stickers, dessert, etc, but none of that
worked for long. Cheerio Champ’s chores
include some combination of getting ready for the day (brush hair, use
bathroom, wash hands and face, put on chapstick, get dressed), making his bed,
dusting, sorting his laundry (Yes, he’s five.
He can read and the baskets are labeled as well as the clothes. What’s the problem? Don’t underestimate your kids!), taking
sheets off bed to be laundered, and cleaning his room.
Many parents make the mistake of nagging at their kids about
chores or giving them too much time to do them in. That backfires in a couple of ways. First, kids stop taking you seriously when
you repeat yourself one hundred times, because they don’t actually have to pay
attention to you the first time you say it to get the message. “Eh…I don’t have to listen this time. She’ll come back in and say it again in a few
minutes.” Say it once and be done. Teach them that you expect them to listen the
first time something is said and not when they feel like listening. Follow through with consequences when
appropriate. And second, if you are
truly working as a team in your household, your kids not getting chores
completed in a timely fashion messes with your rhythm and keeps you from
finishing complementary chores at a reasonable time. For example, if your teen doesn’t dump
clothes in the laundry room until ten o’clock at night but needs clean school
clothes for the next day, I sure hope you weren’t planning to go to bed any
time soon if it was your day to do laundry.
I recommend giving them a reasonable window of time to get it done
in. Tell your teen that you can’t be
bothered to take him to soccer practice until he can be bothered to pick up his
room. That will light a fire under his
rear, guaranteed. If he doesn’t clean
up, follow through on the consequences.
You don’t have any obligations to soccer, after all. He is the one that has to explain why he
couldn’t make it. Cheerio Champ knows
that his block of time to do chores is right before quiet time. I generally give him about ten minutes. At that point, if he’s obviously working
hard, I quietly allow the clock to tick and him to finish. If he’s reading a book and not finished,
well, he made his choice and now it is nap time.
Responsibilities are not necessarily the same as
chores. Cheerio Champ is responsible,
for instance, for cleaning up after himself if he makes a mess. I can’t possibly predict every single mess
he’ll ever make (contrary to popular belief), so I can’t really list that on his chore tower. I can, however, make clear my
expectations. He’s the one that dumped
his water, so he can get paper towels and dry whatever surface. He’s also responsible for such things as
washing his hands after using the bathroom, using his words to tell me if his
sister is touching something she shouldn’t instead of using his hands to
personally prevent her from doing so, taking care of his things (not throwing
or tearing up or leaving where they’ll get ruined), helping mom or dad do
something when asked, not back talking, using good manners, clearing his dishes
or trash after a meal or snack, playing nicely with his sister, being honest
when asked a question, and going to bed when told.
Keep in mind that you are not a terrible parent or being
unreasonable when you require chores of your children. One hundred years ago, parents worked their
kids to the bone because they had to in order to keep the household
running, or the kids themselves earned a living! The kids didn’t even think to
complain, because they needed to eat just like the next person. Kids are capable of much more than we
generally give them credit for. Don’t
underestimate them, don’t over criticize, and give them a chance. They might just surprise you.
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