It's been a huge goal of mine to NOT make housework feel as distasteful to my children as it felt to me when I was a child. When I was about 6 or 7 years old, I remember becoming curious about chores and eager to help the adults. Once my family realized my capabilities, those chores quickly became MY (and my brothers) chores, with little to no adult support going forward.
As an mom, I can absolutely understand why the adults chose to handle household responsibilities handoffs in this way. Being an adult is exhausting. Dumping undesirable tasks on other people creates one less thing that you have to worry about. As an exhausted mom, I get it.
But as a 6/ 7year old, this introduction to helping around the house made me feel resentful and wishing like I should have kept my curiosity to myself. I'm positive that this abrupt hand-off contributed to the intense resistance toward chores that I experienced all throughout my adolescence.
Fast forward to today, I empathize with my kids when it comes to taking on more responsibilities around the home as they get older. For this reason, I'm intentional about making the process of teaching my kids household responsibilities as painless as I possibly can. If we can't make it fun, my goal is to at least make it neutral.
Does that always happen? No. Sometimes, I do have to go mama bear on my little ones. However, I can confidently say that we have more positive experiences than negative ones when it comes to doing chores. I feel really proud of that.
We've been working on establishing routines and systems for a while. My kids can earn an allowance for their contributions to taking care of their home, among other thins.
But here are a couple of routines that we have been working on lately:
Put the house to bed- I set a daily alarm to go off in the evenings. When the alarm goes off, we'll play fun music and/or I'll set a 15 minute timer. Once the alarm goes off, the kids know that it's time to help tidy and reset the public spaces in our home. One big kid will empty and load the dishwasher. Another big kid will clear the dinner table and swiffer the floors. My 5 year olds scour the house, looking for things that are in the wrong place. While this is happening, my husband and I are guiding them & training them and jumping in where we can to make the process go faster. When we are done, the house looks pretty respectable. Most importantly, I feel like we are setting the example that taking care of a home is a team effort, and everyone needs to do their part. Prior to this experiment, we've been working with the kids for a while to learn how to do these basic chores. I've struggled to find the right approach to make this practice consistent. "Putting the house to bed" has definitely been a fun way to help with the consistency piece.
Laundry day- Everyone in the house has officially been assigned a laundry day. My husband and I work on our laundry on Fridays. The boys work on their laundry on Saturdays. The girls work on their laundry on Sundays. On Mondays, I wash miscellaneous items that don't fit into any of the other categories. On your assigned day to wash, you are responsible for washing your clothes for the week as well as your towels and bedding. The boys are mostly old enough to do this independently. Prior to implementing this routine, the boys have been helping sort out and put away laundry for years. Introducing this new step of washing the clothes has worked, almost seamlessly, with the routines that we established before. The boys being able to do their own laundry has lifted such a weight off my shoulders as a working mom. Since we've been stepping up their responsibility, they have a good attitude about it for the most part. The girls are 5, and they have been making progress with this new routine as well. I have a step stool in the laundry room that they can use to make sure they are sprinkling the detergent correctly and use when taking their washed clothes out the washing machine and moving it into the dryer. Just like the boys, the girls are familiar with sorting their clothes out and putting them into their (no fold) drawer system. At this time, they primarily need support with staying on task and hanging a few dresses. Otherwise, they are engaged, excited to help, and they are doing an awesome job l establishing this routine. Just like with my other initiative, I use my Alexa device to help remove the mental load of remembering to tell the kids when it's time to do their laundry. My Alexa device reminds the kids to check on their laundry hourly. Once the laundry is done for the day, the kids are free to shut off the reminders. It's an ongoing reminder, so she will automatically go off again next week.
There are a few more home maintenance routines I would like to establish with the kids before they go off into the world, such as keeping their bathrooms clean and learning how to deep clean, ect. I'm sure we will get there... slowly but surely. But for now, I feel happy with the energy around our new family cleaning routines. I vow to work very hard to protect that energy the best that I can... even if that means the house will be a little messier than I would like for now. We'll keep working together to close the gap.... eventually.
Peace and Blessings,
LaDay