As a parent, it can be difficult to get your kids to help clean the house. Helping your kids to establish good habits can at times feel like a thankless job, but it’s necessary as part of helping them to begin to learn how to take care of themselves and to better understand the time and effort you put in when you are the caretaker. Fortunately, there are many ways to motivate them and encourage them to see the bigger picture! Here are 10 suggestions of ways to help motivate your kiddos to help out with housework.
1. Have your kids pick their favorite song or movie and have them clean while it plays in the background – it makes cleaning more fun and the time goes by quicker
2. Give your kids a time limit on how long they can play video games, then require that they help you with housework for the duration of their allotted time – this can also be done in the reverse, by setting an amount of time for your kids to help you with housework and allowing them to use the rest of their time to do something they enjoy
3. Make a chore chart – assign chores to each kid, using the chart as a visual to help them track their chores and allow them to see their accomplishments by checking them off the list each day
4. Teach older children how to do laundry and rotate the chore with them, so that they begin to see their role in the household and also see that you are making an equal effort to avoid them seeing the chore as their “burden”
5. Create incentives by rewarding good behavior with treats like ice cream or going out for pizza together as a family, while reinforcing the idea that them making the right choices amounts to positive consequences
6. Let your kids choose their own chore to do each day or allow them to set up tasks for each day of the week (this may take some time but it will be worth it in the long run)
7. Install a Sink Spinner to make cleaning fun as well as effective, and the first few times they use it you can help them by spraying the disinfectant for them first, until they get used to performing the whole process independently
8. Make cleaning into a game by setting up obstacles such as organizing tasks in an order that makes sense and challenges such as time limits for tasks that get increasingly shorter as they become more capable at doing each chore
9. Set up a reward system where, if your child completes all of his/her tasks without complaining, he/she gets an extra 15 minutes of screen time at the end of the day. Or a weekly goal can be set where the incentive comes at the end of the week and is greater, encouraging them to push through those days when they might otherwise have complained
10. Have them put away their clothes when they take off their pajamas in the morning to avoid having piles of laundry all over your house, or give them their own laundry basket or hamper in their room for them to put their dirty clothes in. They will begin to see how quickly laundry piles up and why it’s necessary to do laundry frequently.
Try any of these 10 methods and see which of them works best for your family, maybe even combining some of the suggestions to best fit your kids individually. We hope this helps you to get your kiddos to do chores without complaining or bickering too much and that it will help you help them to establish good habits and to contribute! If all else fails, we’re here for you.
We also hope that you will allow Sink Spinner to help create great habits with your kids and be a part of helping you to have a cleaner bathroom sink!
