Getting children to do household tasks
Mar. 9th, 2009 09:57 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
mrsbrownHere 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.
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.
