This post is a continuation of the “Age Appropriate Chores Series”. You can read previous posts by clicking here.
Speaking of a sense of accomplishment and pride, we found it much more effective to actually give a child a certain chore, certain area, a certain jurisdiction rather than passing out chores each day, using a job jar, etc. What I mean by this is that we taught a child to do a chore completely, and that naturally became that child’s job.
So when a child learned to unload the dishwasher, unloading the dishwasher became their job. It wasn’t something he helped with. It wasn’t something he did on occasion. It wasn’t something that he did if Mom wasn’t there to do it. It became his.
This doesn’t mean you do not change jobs and pass them out differently after a while. It simply means for whatever period of time you designated this task, whether it is washing, drying, folding, and putting away a load of laundry every day or unloading the dishwasher and setting the table for dinner every day, it is yours.
As your children grow in age and developmentally, you teach them more and more skills, and they are able to add more and more chore. I can remember my children anticipating each new season as they got to move up into “harder” chores—and their “lesser” chore moved down to a younger one. It was a rite of passage to move up into laundry and out of dishes or into assistant chef for dinner and out of laundry. When it comes to chores, keep in mind the biblical admonitions that “to whom much is given, much is expected” and “to add a little at a time, precept upon precept.”
As an aside to this point, I can remember when our youngest was about seven or eight, and he learned laundry. It was so excited to move up to a bigger chore—and relished the thought that his dish days might soon be behind him. When the day came for him to take over two loads of fold up laundry from start to finish each day, he wanted to know who was going to take his dishwasher unloading and reloading twice a day.
When we explained that nobody was—he was keeping that and adding the fold up laundry, his little face was priceless. “You mean there’s nobody taking my dishes now?”
I told him that Daddy did dishes every day for the past twenty-five years, and he was much pretty doomed to dishes for fifty or sixty years if he was a good husband some day!
Of course, in addition to building skills and character in your children, this is a real boost to the family. Imagine, if you are not currently operating in this protocol of chores, that you have four children, ages six, eight, ten, and twelve. And tomorrow morning when you get up, and you are doing phonics and oral reading with your six-year-old, that day’s laundry, dishes, trash, and breakfast preparations are all being done – completely, thoroughly, and consistently. What freedom this provides for a busy mother! And what family unity it builds when the family works together in this way.
Then, breakfast is over, and when you have a language arts meeting with the two older children, the eight-year-old and six year-old children clean the kitchen, load the dishwasher and run it, wipe the kitchen down, and sweep the floor. All that happened because the appropriate training took place, and chore sessions were implemented.
I really feel that giving full responsibility of certain chores to children is paramount in helping children become independent workers and responsible. It is easy to do something when you are asked to do it, but it is character building and life-skill-giving to be responsible for something solely.
*For a complete list of all ages and appropriate chores (including Working With Someone Else lists), see our Age-Appropriate Chores Poster Pack.
