Chore Ideas for Kids Helping With Housework

With kids out of school for the past month (or more, depending on your region’s lockdown!) I’ve seen parents struggle to get through their usual daily to-do list.  When times are tough, we cut the excess.

But when times are really tough, we start really paring down what we can accomplish in a day. And outsourcing some of our housework to outside help isn’t an option right now either!

So I thought it was time to remind parents of how capable of helping around the house our kids really are. A chore ideas for kids isn’t an entirely unacceptable idea!

But, what if we tried?

Back in 1982, a researcher named Harriet Rheingold observed 80 different children. The children ranged in age from 18-30 months and Rheingold observed them interacting with their parents.  She asked the parents to go about their normal household tasks. 

So, the parents were folding laundry, dusting, sweeping, moving dishes, and picking up toys from the floor. All the while, their children followed along. The parents weren’t to ask the children blatantly to help. 

However, they were asked to move slowly and deliberately with their motions and allow the child to participate in some way if they indicated a desire to do so. All 80 children voluntarily got involved with the tasks.

In Rheingold’s words,

“The children carried out their efforts with quick and energetic movement, excited vocal intonations, animated facial expressions, and with delight in the finished task.”

 

When my children were small, I gave it a try myself

Estelle was fascinated with watching me prepare meals and always pestered me to let her do the chopping. I finally gave in (more out of exasperation than in an attempt to be a thoughtful parent, to be honest.) I didn’t trust her with the knife at that age, so instead I let her help me add spices.

From there, I taught her to chop the veggies. She took her cooking responsibility very seriously. It was adorable, really. If she caught me chopping without her she’d put her hands on her hips and say, “Muuuuuuum, that’s MY job!”  The best chore ideas for kids can be something they really enjoy!

By the time she was 6, she was doing a fairly decent job helping me cook. She could make simple meals almost on her own – spaghetti, scrambled eggs, etc.

It became a genuine help to me at that point, and she had learned how to contribute to the household responsibilities at a young age. It became part of her chores, and I never really had to force her to learn how to do it in the first place. Full disclosure: Estelle has become a much more impressive cook than I ever was!

Giving Kids Responsibility is Good for Their Long-term Well-Being

When you try to wrangle your older kids into helping around the house, they naturally resist. They become argumentative and shrug it off as if it isn’t their job.

Except….it is.

We need to stop looking at household chores as Mum’s job or Dad’s job. Instead, we need to take on the view that the entire family contributes to the running of the home. Everyone eats, sleeps, plays, and otherwise benefits from living in this space. A chore list for kids is simply part of everyday life.

We’ve been programmed to think that “kids should be kids” and should be shielded from adult responsibility. Yes, kids SHOULD be kids. Absolutely.

But we aren’t raising kids, we are raising adults

If we don’t do our part in teaching them how to take care of themselves and their future family, we’ve failed them.

As parents, we are overwhelmed, overworked, and overrun by responsibilities. We are exhausted all the time. We have more on our plates than ever before.

Many of us are juggling careers, educating our children now that schools are closed, maintaining a marriage, keeping up with other important relationships, and running a home. That is a lot. And it’s a load we shouldn’t shoulder alone.

When we do, our kids get the short end of the stick.

What if we decided to change our family culture? What if our home became one where everyone contributes, from the toddlers on up to the teens?

”We parents, in our culture, tend to make two mistakes regarding our little children’s desires to help. First, we brush their offers to help aside, because we are in a rush to get things done and we believe (often correctly) that the toddler’s “help” will slow us down or the toddler won’t do it right and we’ll have to do it over again. 

Second, if we do actually want help from the child, we offer some sort of deal, some reward, for doing it. In the first case, we present the message to the child that he or she is not capable of helping; and in the second case, we present the message that helping is something a person will do only if they get something in return.”

(from Psychology Today)

How can we start now to make positive changes that teach our kids important life skills and let go of the heavy load we’ve been carrying?

How can you start to make that change?

1. Let go of the guilt of requiring chores.

It’s not a bad thing to instill a sense of responsibility. The earlier you start, the better.

2. Consider skipping the rewards charts.

Research shows that children who have been rewarded for a chore are 50-70% less likely to keep doing the chore if a reward isn’t offered every time. Compare that to 90% of children who continue to do their chores when they are expected as part of their weekly responsibility – without reward.

3. Don’t make it a fight.

You don’t need to battle your kids. Chores don’t top their list of fun activities, but that’s okay. You can make it fun. Turn on a movie and fold laundry together. Let your kids cook alongside you.

You can start a new family tradition. Friday night homemade pizza and board games – let them help roll out the pizza dough and put on the toppings! One fun night of participation can be the invitation to routine participation cooking dinner every night.

4. It isn’t an all or nothing pursuit.

You don’t need to overhaul your entire family structure tomorrow. Start slowly with an invitation to help you plan next week’s dinner menu or an afternoon tidy-up to some upbeat music.

5. Resist re-doing their chores after them.

Resist criticizing a job poorly done at first. If they are doing their best, then that’s a start. Correcting and criticizing are the quickest ways to discourage them from even trying. Model how to do things the right way. And smile and genuinely appreciate their efforts when they try.

With practice, they’ll get better. You may have to relax your standards and let them do things their way, much like Estelle’s cooking! Who knows? Maybe they’ll find an even better way of doing things and you’ll end up learning from them!

6. Resist using chores as punishments.

If chores are associated with punishment, children will have a negative connotation with them forever. Let the children first learn their chores in a fun, casual way.

7. Sometimes, it helps to make a task manageable by sharing the load.

For preschoolers, try “You pick up 10 toys, and I’ll pick up 10 toys, and we’ll see who finishes first.” For older children, try, “You water the plants while I pick the weeds.”

8. Realize this is an ongoing pursuit.

This isn’t going to be a change that happens overnight, or even over the course of a few months or a year. This is going to be a shift that takes place gradually. In the end, when your kids leave home with the life skills necessary to make it on their own, it will be entirely worth it. This type of investment is a long-term one.

And quite frankly, there’s no better time to begin. If you have toddlers and preschoolers, now is a perfect time to start allowing them to participate when they are curious. If you have older children, look for an opportunity this week to create a bit of fun surrounding one aspect of housework. A simple chore list for kids is all that’s needed.

The real goal here isn’t to create little cleaning machines though. It’s to create a family culture where everyone contributes without needing a reward or a punishment. A culture where it’s the norm and not the exception to help out where needed and pick up the slack when someone else can’t.

Let us know what you try!

Choose a Chore List for Kids From the Ones Below

Age-Appropriate Household Contributions for Toddlers

• Pick up toys and put them in a basket/box
• Put dirty clothes in a basket
• Feed pets
• Clean up their own spills

Age-Appropriate Household Contributions for Preschoolers

All of the above, plus:

• Feed the pets
• Water the indoor plants
• Water the outdoor plants with the hose
• Set the dinner table
• Get the mail
• Put away the clean silverware from dishwasher
• Sweep/mop the kitchen floor
• Wipe down the lower kitchen cabinets
• Make his/her bed
• Put shoes away
• Dump their dirty clothes into laundry basket
• Move the laundry from washer to dryer, dryer to basket
• Fold portions of the laundry (Watch Marie Kondo teach preschoolers to fold laundry and you’ll never underestimate them again!)
• Pick up the toys at the end of the day

Age-Appropriate Household Contributions for Ages 5-8

All of the above, plus:

• Bringing dirty dishes to the sink after meals
• Making their own school lunch
• Doing the Laundry
• Clean out the car (even using the vaccuum!)
• Vaccuum rugs
• Sweep & Mop
• Put away groceries
• Help cook meals
• Walk the dog

Age-Appropriate Household Contributions for Ages 9+

All of the above, plus:

• Unload dishwasher
• Clean bathroom
• Wash the car
• Mow the yard
• Weed the garden
• Change bedsheets

Be sure to try out a suitable chore list for kids so they can help with the housework and enjoy the benefits it affords them.

References

Deci, E. L., Koestner, R., & Ryan, R. M. (1999). A meta-analytic review of experiments examining the effects of extrinsic rewards on intrinsic motivation. Psychological Bulletin, 125, 627–668.

Psychology Today “Kids Want to Help, and We Should Let Them.”

Read more: