How to Get Your Children to do Their Chores!

All good families assign chores to its members. Young to old, it must be done. The sooner young children learn to help, the more likely they’ll become contributing members of society. Toddlers easily learn how to pick up toys and put them into a container. Putting away silverware from the dishwasher is another easy task. Kids can sort laundry once they have a concept of colors and folding towels is often considered to be fun. A 9-month-old may not understand chores, but if she’s going to crawl all over my floors, I might as well attach a Swiffer to her tummy and get some work done!

There are hundreds of chore chart systems available. Usually, each member of the family has a list of duties assigned under his/her name. My young kids would enjoy putting a check mark on the chart when a job had been completed. It was even fun, at first.

But I struggled with continuity. Everyone seemed to forget their chores. They would even forget to just look at the chart! Nothing was clicking and nobody liked my nagging.

Then, I decided to try something different. I wondered if more of a visual, than a written chart, might help. I got my camera and my kids, and off we went.

I had each child pose, as if completing a particular chore, in the picture. One would be pretending to sweep the floor. One picture would be of a child feeding the dog. A kid would be folding laundry. Another would be posing as if rinsing a dish. They had fun making the photos, and after I had them printed, I attached them to poster boards assigned to each child. 

I would remind the children to go look at their boards to see if they’d completed all their chores. For some reason, seeing the picture of the chore seemed to make more of an impression than merely reading the words. For the kids just learning to read, this was also a huge independent step.

It worked brilliantly. I would see them pointing to each photo and thinking of whether they’d done that task. If they’d forgotten something, seeing the picture seemed to remind them and they’d run off to get it done. I would be told when they were finished and a quick check on my part was all that was needed. Very few corrections or reminders were used.

Later, I then repeated the process of making photos, for daily routines. The kids posed for pictures of brushing teeth, washing hands, doing homework, and grabbing lunch boxes. Again, these posters were huge time and stress savers on ol’ mom. Instead of nagging and repeating myself, they could look at the pictures and really make sure they’d physically completed what the photos showed.

All of these years later and my children still remember their chore charts. My daughter now keeps whiteboards and several rooms of the house to write out her chores as a continuation of the visual list idea. This method worked for months and even years. As they got older, we’d do new photos of new chores and update the boards.

Children have a lot on their minds and a lot going on, even far more than we do sometimes. Instead of jumping straight to getting angry whenever a child forget some thing, perhaps consider why they are forgetting. Helping them come up with fun ways to remember what they are supposed to do will benefit the whole household in the long run. If your child seems to be having extra or more severe issues with memory or executive functioning, you can always consider an assessment to see what's going on as well. Here at Birch we can provide assessments to determine if there is an ADD or ADHD diagnosis present, or if their perceived lack of focus has more to do with external factors or other disorders. Different tips and recommendations can be made for how to best work with your child to make things easier for everyone. And it’s nice to cross off nagging from our list!

Kyndal Sims

Birch Psychology