Teaching Your Children to be Helpful
A helpful child is a wonderful thing. You have to ask less for help and they are more willing when you do ask. Not that they’ll be cheerful or willing all the time, but if you teach them young they are more likely to want to be helpful.
Many parents make the mistake of starting to require chores when their children are older rather than younger. The problem with this is that the child isn’t used to helping and so resents the new requirements.
I started my kids off very young. My son started at about age 14 or 15 months helping put dishes away from the dishwasher. My kids have plastic dishes, so there’s no worry about breakage. He loves it. Of course, he’s only 19 months old now, so there’s a long way to go.
My daughter started helping me make salads when she was 2. Tearing the lettuce is a fun job at that age and really helped her to feel involved. She’s 4 now and is expected to help more now. She has to pick up her own toys, set her own place at the table and still helps with the salads. She’s not always happy about it, but rules are rules.
One tool we’ve just initiated for her recently is a chore chart. She gets to mark off the chores she has completed each day. This helps to determine how much allowance she gets. I know there’s a debate on whether or not allowance should be related to chores, and from this you can easily figure out my position on the matter. The chart is a nice visual reminder. If you’d like one, we bought it on Amazon.
We have a lot of plans on how chores will increase as appropriate for each age, based greatly on what my husband and I did growing up and on the problems we both saw with kids who didn’t have to do a lot of chores when they were in the dorms in college. I’m talking about college students who have no idea how to cook even basic meals or do their own laundry. We’d rather avoid that problem for our children.
We don’t plan on teaching our daughter and our son different things either. I fully intend for my daughter to have to learn to work with basic tools, both to build simple items and to do minor repairs around the house, just as my son will have to be comfortable cooking and doing laundry. Vice versa, of course. They’ll also both have to learn to change a tire, check the oil and such on cars. To me these are simple, practical things that a young adult should learn.
Even beyond allowance issues, chores should simply be a part of being a member of the family. If every child has to learn to be responsible within the family, they will learn to be responsible elsewhere.
[tags]children,family,chores[/tags]
