Getting children to do household tasks

[mrsbrown]

Here are a couple of things I tried when I had three children who failed to participate in the cleaning process. They worked for a while and then fell over, for various reasons.

I console myself by a quote from Sean Covey, In "7 habits of Effective Families". "My family tried lots of different things to get us to do chores. Most of them stopped working after a while. But the important thing is that they kept trying."

15 min of power.
Make a agreement with all children that 15min of cleaning is not a long time. Set a timer for 15 min, play working music. Everybody does chores for 15min. All stop.
After the 4th night, I had to start making up chores for the kids and I cleaned the bathroom!

Earn money
I started this when I realised that I would be happy to pay a cleaner, but didn't feel comfortable paying my kids for chores. This is a hybrid.
Every possible house chore I could think of was assigned a dollar value. All children had to do $15 worth of housework as their contribution. Extra chores after the base contribution were paid as pocket money.
This one stopped after I had to pay one of my children $50 one week and I didn't have it. Be careful what rates you negotiate.

Keep track
I made a list of every job and a list of each person in the house with a bar chart. Each fortnight every time you did a job you crossed it off the master list and coloured in a square of your bar chart.
That one stopped because MTB boycotted it and made sure the kids knew he was was boycotting it.

Threaten to throw stuff away
I would rake (with a garden rake) all the toys and floor detritus into the centre of the room. Then I told the kids that everything in the pile would be thrown out in 5 min. I usually had to put some things away myself, but just getting it all into one pile helped.

Comments

[astemudfoot.livejournal.com]

I just started the "assign a dollar value to each chore" program.

I did a compromise where I decided I was happy to pay a basic retainer fee for chores the kids should do out of obligation. All exra chores were assigned a value so they have the opportunity to earn extra money.

It's been an interesting experiment. The values are quite low so it's affoardable, and my kids are young so don't need a lot of money yet. We've had discussions on economy, obligation, and the theories of contracts and sub-contracts as a result. And my middle daughter (the most mercenary of the 3) worked really hard to earn extra money to buy a book she wanted.

So far, it seems to be working. I'm sure they'll loose interest, but I think this model works well for us.

[villana.livejournal.com]

My mother tried all of these and a few more. They worked with my sister but not with me.
She is now a grot and I am tidy.

Go figure.

[omnot.livejournal.com]

I've not been able to overcome the problem involved in getting children to actually work for fifteen minutes. Mine tend to go excruciatingly slowly because they are just running the clock out, or only work when I am watching them. Then there is the ill feeling and arguments between the siblings over who is slacking off the most.

I need to institute a pay-for-chores system again, and adjust it until it works. *sigh*

[mrsbrown.livejournal.com]

Maybe it would be worth starting with 5min?

I think it needs to be a length of time that they agree is trivial and reasonable for them contribute to the household.

Also, MsNotaGoth always needed more supervision 'cos I think she felt like she didn't have the skills to do it "properly". I had to teach her how to break the task up into smaller tasks - pick up every piece of paper; now pick up all the rubbish; put the dirty clothes in the basket and the clean ones on your bed for later.

[mmy-me.livejournal.com]

That was a timely post! Similar thoughts are going through my mind at the moment, mostly stifled due to apathy on my part. I really do need to get back into it; with my going back to work we need to balance the cleaning load and the ratio of who does what.

We used to (before aforementioned apathy set in) have a hybrid system of 'obligatory' chores and 'paid chores'. We tracked the jobs on a chart, and for each paid job you had to do an unpaid one too in order to get the money (we had some issues around selective chore-ing).

It only worked in our family if we had the cash to pay up, and we found that was hard. I'm contemplating working out a 'bank account' system instead. This may be more successful from my end. As most of the pocket money was spent on books (we have another rule that the kids can buy books from the school book club if they save up half, and we'll pay the other half) it could work pretty well I think.

Haven't done too much threatening to throw stuff away, but we did once empty a room of all but the bed, in order that tidying would be unimportant. It made a point, but it was soon forgotten, and it was a lot of hard work. I did get a good deep clean done though.

[quatrefoil.livejournal.com]

I grew up with the system that my set amount of pocket money depended on me doing set jobs around the house. For most of my childhood that meant cleaning my bedroom and the bathroom, later I got more money if I did the household ironing as well (I had to do my own washing and ironing if I wanted clean and ironed clothes). It was a straight labour negotiation - I could withhold labour, but then I didn't get paid. It didn't matter how long the job took me, I still got paid the same amount, so it was in my interest to get it done quickly, but my parents had the power so if it wasn't done to their satisfaction I didn't get paid. It seemed to work pretty well.