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

[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.