Top 5 tips for when your kids won't do their chores: How Catholic Moms can troubleshoot cleaning with kids and get their kids to do their chores more consistently

Tired of the chore wars?  Let's dig in to how to set your kids up for success!

I'm telling you the first five things you need to look at to get to the root of the problem and troubleshoot chore time with your kids.

Download your age by age guide to learn how to teach your kids the skills they need to help out around the house.   Grab it here.

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Transcript

Hello friends and Happy Easter, I hope you had a wonderful week. Last week, I took the week off personally, which was pretty great. I spent the time with my family and just resting and resetting and dreaming up some dreams and planning some plans, which I am so excited to share with you in the coming months. But I wanted to go ahead and jump right in on our topic for today, which is the next in the series about real life with our kids. And we're going to talk about a favorite topic for so many moms chores. So I think it's really obvious why we want our kids to do their chores. So first part, we want to teach them to be responsible people and contributing members of the family. And second, we really want to help build their life skills and their sense of self esteem. And knowing they can do things, I used to be a resident advisor or university that was assigned to freshmen. And they would so often come in and not know how to do their laundry. So that first week of being an RA for them, I was always giving laundry lessons, just really basic stuff. So I always had that is just one of those firsthand experiences of seeing what happens when kids don't learn to do these things ahead of time. And maybe I'll teach my kids how to do their laundry before they go to college. So let's talk a little bit about how to teach our kids to do their chores, and just a little more about like how to figure out what's age appropriate for them. So first of all, if you're more of a visual person, I do want to let you know I have a guide for this that goes age by age that you can find linked in the show notes. And download is just a list of what's kind of age appropriate practical life skills that kids can learn. And so that might be helpful to you for this conversation. But just to kind of break it down. Kids who are under the age of three, are all about just learning to use their bodies. Well, they are not so focused on actually accomplishing a task so much as just learning the patterns of it. Like they really they love order. But they like doing things over and over. So they're the kind of age where they would like to rake the leaves into a pile with you. But then scatter the pile and do it all over again. Because to them, the goal isn't to actually accomplish anything, like cleaning up their blocks, their goal is not to have a clean space, their goal is to do the activity of putting the blocks into the basket. And so they're just as likely to dump it out again and do it all over again. Our kids over the age of three, they started to be a little more purposeful. And they're really interested in noticing things like patterns in building their vocabulary. And they're all about learning to be self sufficient. They are the Help me to help myself, ah, you'll notice this like your kids at this age, they don't want you buckling them into their car seat anymore. They scream and shout and say no, I do it, I do it. And so for many things, we actually just need to take a step back and set up a way for them to learn the skills they're so rapidly trying to acquire instead of what we always have this tendency to do, which is to step in and intervene. Then around each five and a half to six. And beyond that the kids start to really take ownership and even show the glimmers of like the leadership, if that's in their personality, for wanting to be contributors to their family to society. And this is an age where you start to see them fostering more consistency. So it's not just on a whim, I want to polish this, what you see in the three to six age range. But more, this is my job. And I can take ownership of that. So let's talk about the things that go into troubleshooting. When our kids are having trouble with their chores. The first thing you need to look at is the family culture, have they bought in to a shared purpose with you? Do they share your vision because a lot of times when kids are having trouble with doing their chores, it's because they don't really see the point. It's not connected to their life, and they don't see the immediate value from it. So it's a lot more motivating for like little kids, if you tell them once we get the table cleared off from breakfast, we can spread out the art supplies stuff, they can immediately connect and see the value of the second thing you have to look at is whether or not they have sufficient knowledge. A lot of times kids who are having trouble with a chore like if you tell a kid go clean your room. It's actually really overwhelming to them, because they don't know where to begin. There's so many categories of things that they could be doing. Even starting is difficult. So for some kids, you really have to scaffold you have to break it down into smaller pieces. Say things like okay, take this trash bag and find all the trash then come to me with for your next assignment. Or sometimes you can write a list of steps I go the for First, you're going to clean out the trash, then you're going to put the books on the shelf, then you're going to put the laundry in the hamper. Just break it down a little bit more, because especially if they've got anything with like executive dysfunction issues like ADHD, then they really need this broken down, they might even need it broken down more than that. The next thing you need to consider is do they actually have the abilities they need for this task. And so one of the traps that we fall into often as parents is we assume that because a kid can do something in a certain way, one time, that means they can do it consistently. But there's a whole slew of skills apart from things like, say, unloading the dishwasher that goes into that consistency. And those skills don't always develop at the same time. So again, things like impulse control, or executive function, or focus. So you might find, yes, your kid is having a really focused day, and they can unload the dishwasher that day. But then they might have another day where the focus isn't there. And the dishwasher is only unloaded a third of the way before they get distracted. That doesn't mean that they were being lazy, it means that they weren't developmentally at that point. And they still needed you to be helping with a little bit of supervision and a little bit more prompting. And this is why you'll often see that if they've had actually like a lot going on at school, kids will use up so much of their energy on other things and not be able to do their chores as well. So you see, like the first couple of weeks of school, they have a really hard time with what was not so difficult for them all summer, because during the summer, they had the bandwidth to do these things. But they didn't necessarily when they were working so hard and using up so much energy and brainpower to try and learn all the new things. So the next thing you want to look at is whether your kids have all the decision rights, they need to do a chore well. Kelsey I think this issue comes up most often when we're asking our children to take on an area of house that's not their own. For instance, if you're asking your kids to help clean out the garage, they might not know what to do with the things that are there because they don't belong to them. And they don't have the decision rights, they don't have the power or the ability or the authority to decide whether these things get donated or thrown away. And that can stall out their activity, it can paralyze them. So what you want to do Under this circumstance is actually come up with a framework that you can give them for how they can make decisions, like anything that is super dirty goes in the trash. And all the clothes go to be donated, just give them a decision tree that they can follow. And then they're able to actually tackle some of those bigger steps. So anytime you see that a chore is not getting done, because someone's paralyzed with indecision, it could be that they'd need a little bit more clearly outlined from you what their decision rights are. Now, the last thing that's worth looking at is incentives. So for instance, if your kid doesn't want to clean their room, how does that affect their life? Because sometimes what happens is they go forever without cleaning their room and what happens we step in, and we do it for them. So an incentive we might be inadvertently setting up there is to postpone it until mom gets so sick of it that she just does it for me. But I do want to caution you to look at incentives as the last thing on the list. Because one of the other things we mentioned is the root cause then however you change the incentives isn't going to change a thing about whether your kid is able to handle the chore. If you don't make sure they're tied into the vision if you don't make sure that they have the decision rights, the knowledge and the abilities to do it. Incentives are going to have no effect except to add to their frustration. And you want to build a culture where doing chores is something that we do out of love for one another something we do to make our home a pleasant place to be and something we all benefit from