Our philosophy about kids and chores can be summarized like this:
- a) Chores are not tied to allowance. a.k.a. if I don’t get money for chores, why should they?
- b) If asked, they are expected to follow through (hopefully without comment and eyeball rolling)
- c) We clean up each other’s messes as required.
- d) We don’t have chore lists or specific tasks i.e. It’s never Emma’s week to take out the green bin, but if I ask her, she has to do it.
We have had mixed results with this way of handling chores, not terrible, but not great either.
Mark hit upon a good idea awhile ago and I wanted to share it with you because it’s made a huge difference in our household.
It’s not earth-shattering, in fact, it’s laughably simple and many of you might already be doing this… are you ready? The whole family cleans the house for a focused 15 minutes together, right after dinner.
Someone (usually me) is cleaning the kitchen after dinner anyway, which takes 15-20 minutes, so why shouldn’t everyone be doing something to help out? i.e. (INSTEAD OF LOLLING AROUND MAKING ME FEEL RESENTFUL OF THEIR LEISURE TIME.)
There isn’t enough room in our kitchen for four people to help wash/tidy/sweep/put away the dishes. So, we divide and conquer the rest of the house.
Someone grabs the vacuum. Someone sorts the recycling. Someone straightens up the front entrance (a huge issue for us since we don’t have a good place to store our stuff (there’s no proper closet – with a door – to hide our coats and shoes!) and someone takes care of tidying the living room etc.
If anyone is “caught” doing something other than cleaning we tack five minutes on to the remaining time. This has only happened once.
It is amazing how much we get done in that short amount of time. Fifteen minutes doesn’t seem like a lot, but when four people are keenly tidying it adds up to an hour of cleaning. And it’s made a difference around here.
Next up: the basement. (I keep saying that but I can’t bring myself to go down there. It’s just so overwhelming. Ugh.)
