How Moms Can Work Themselves Out of Their Chores (A Step By Step Guide)

You have probably figured this out, but doing chores with your child is infinitely more difficult than just doing it yourself. The bad news with teaching chores, however, is that you must allow your child to “help” you before you can really expect the child to do the chore.

Let me assure you, it is so worth the effort it will take you to teach chores. My children are now 11, 9, 7, and 3. Each person brings along laundry, dishes, and personal messes they leave behind them. If you try to take on the cleaning for your entire family forever, you will probably have a breakdown at some point.

“You need the whole family to contribute to the solution, not just the problem.”

My older two children currently do all dishes in our home. Just the two of them. Just try to imagine your life without dishes each day. I promise, teaching chores is worth your efforts. So let them help you.

Read: How to Raise Cleaning Machines: An Epic Household Chore List

Children love to copy their parents. If you give your toddler a rag and have her come along with you while you dust, she will be thrilled. She will want to do chores. Have this be your first step on your journey toward having chores at your house.

Move on to Teaching

The cleaning quality won’t be anywhere near as good as it is when you do it. It just won’t. Accept that. With your young children, you can go back and fix it later and the child won’t notice. Wait until bedtime or something, though, so the child doesn’t see you fixing it.If you don’t have to fix it, don’t. Sometimes you do need to fix it. Take vacuuming.

If you let your child vacuum week after week with no correction, you will soon find you have dust mites building up in your carpet. So you might let the child vacuum one week, then the next week say it is your turn to vacuum that area and your child can vacuum this other area. Even with my seven year old, I do her vacuuming for her once a month so I can be sure the room is vacuumed really thoroughly from time to time.

Again, don’t be afraid to continue to teach and correct. Doing chores is a learning process. “I love how shiny this counter got. I noticed you missed the part behind the faucet; you want to make sure you wipe that whole counter each time.”

We have an iRobot. The first time we ran that thing, I sat and watched it for two hours. That was two hours I could have been accomplishing something else, but sometimes I can be controlling. It also was pretty nice watching my floor get clean while something else did it.

Give your child some space while he cleans. Do not stand there and watch every move. You can watch the first few times during the teaching process, but at some point, walk away. Tell your child you know he has learned well and can do the job independently.

“People don’t like to be micromanaged, not even little people.”

I still inspect after a job is done, however. I inspect even with my oldest child still. I slowly raise my standards as they get older. I let them know that now that they are older, we are going to work on xyz about that cleaning job. Keep the correcting positive and focus on teaching.

Your child will start out enthusiastic. Yay for being just like mom! At some point, however, your child will realize that it is work, and work just isn’t fun for a lot of people. Mark Twain pointed this out in his book The Adventures of Tom Sawyer.

“Work consists of whatever a body is obliged to do, and Play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do.”

Once the chores become a chore, the child will start to fall out of love for the activity. Require it anyway. You can help make the work less cumbersome. Chores don’t have to be dull and boring to be chores. Crank up the music. Work all at the same time; there is something pleasing to the soul to work as a family unit.

Point out how nice it feels to have things cleaned up once done. Commiserate with your child, “I know chores aren’t always fun, but it is so nice to have things cleaned up when we are done.” (See my post on Making Work Fun for more on the topic.)

Also, sometimes using a Chore Wheel, Chore Cards, or a Chore Jar can help keep the child interested in chores. Mix things like this up every so often to introduce some novelty to the process.