I was never taught how to clean.
As a child, I remember being told to clean my room, but never walked through the steps on how to actually do it. It’s taken me a lot of years in my adult life to figure out what products to use, how often to clean a space, and how to make it not a miserable experience.
When I had my son, I was determined to send him out into the world with more knowledge than I had. He’s now 9, and at a good age to really learn the basics of cleaning, but what 9 year old wants to learn how to clean?
It’s been a struggle, and I’m partially to blame. When I’m pressed for time, it’s easier to just clean things myself than taking the time to teach. However, my husband and I decided keeping our home cleaner, and teaching our son how to help with chores, was one of our parenting goals, so we needed to come up with a plan.
Related reading: Children Benefit From Doing Chores
We wanted our son to get practice in all areas of cleaning, so we went around the house and figured out all the tasks that we felt our son was old enough to learn. We made a list, and decided we’d all do one task per day. Being a nerdy family, my husband had the idea of using a D20 dice to “choose” what task we had each day. Using a dice to roll for our daily chore gives some fun and whimsy to the process, and it’s easy to blame the dice goblins when we roll a chore we don’t want to do.
Something my son loves is that anyone can do any chore. Our son can roll to clean the bathrooms, but my husband and I can also roll to clean his playroom, which he’s laughed at each time it’s happened.
We also decided to add a family reward if we went an entire month of all of us doing our daily chores with minimal complaining. Our son chose an ice cream date for the month of January, and it was nice to have a common goal we were all working towards.
We’ve been doing this system for about 6 weeks now, and it’s been really good for us. We chose to complete our chores after homework, and before any screens, playing with friends, or sports practices. The chores took a bit longer the first few weeks since we were doing a lot of teaching and going over expectations, but now each chore takes 10-15 minutes to complete, especially since our home has stayed cleaner overall since starting this.
I’m so glad we started this new chore system. Not only is it allowing my son to learn new life skills, but it’s also taken a huge weight off of my shoulders. It’s nice to know that even when life gets hectic with work, school, sports practices and appointments, three areas of our house are getting cleaned every day. We always say that we’re a family team, and this new chore system encourages everyone to pitch in and take responsibility for our home.
I created a chore chart for you to download and use if you’d like to start implementing this in your household!
Download your own printable version here: Roll For Chores!
A few tips:
- The chores with (m) next to them are ones we do monthly. If we roll that chore more than once a month, we just re-roll.
- If we roll “family decision,” we look around the house and assign the area that needs the most work.
- You can find a pretty cheap set of dice on Amazon if you’re not a nerdy family that already has a bunch laying around
- Us as parents don’t only do one chore every day. Dishes get washed even if not rolled for, laundry gets put away, meals get made, etc. This system was designed to teach, make sure at least three areas of our house get cleaned every day, and to get our son excited to do his chores, (or at least as excited as a 9 year old gets about cleaning!)
