The Lazy Genius Podcast - #117 - How to Lazy Genius Kid Chores

Episode Date: August 5, 2019

Chores seem like a good anchor in the summer, but they really are a huge part of routine in the fall. But how do we do it? Allowance or no allowance, charts or no charts, how young is too young or how old is too old? All the things. Today, I share how I handle chores for my kids, but also how you can think about what matters and what doesn’t in relation to kids’ chores to create a system that makes sense for your family. Stuff Mentioned If you want to hear more about our family’s complaining tally system, I talk about it in the Grasping for Summer Routine episode. If you’re looking for your own magnetic white board for your fridge, here’s a good deal on one with markers on Amazon. Join me live on Instagram around 12:15 p.m. EST on Thursday to chat about kid chores. If Facebook is your kind of thing, we’ve got a Lazy Genius community over there. Join us and make some friends. Wednesday is the last day to let me know what you want to see more of on the podcast and blog by completing our audience survey. Plus, one lucky participant will receive a free Planetbox Rover lunchbox after the survey ends. Fill it out here. Download a transcript for this episode. This podcast is hosted by Kendra Adachi and executive produced by Kendra Adachi, Jenna Fischer and Angela Kinsey. To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

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multiply at a rate that would make a rabbit say, yo. Chill. But Laura shopped on Amazon and saved on cleaning spray, countertop wipes, and fly traps. Hey, fruit flies, your baby boom ends here. Save the Every Day with Amazon. Hello, friends. You are listening to the Lazy Genius Podcast. I'm Kendra Adachi, and I'm here to help you be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. Today is another highly requested episode, much like last week's on transitioning kids' clothes,

and that is kids' chores. We're in our final week of kind of a loose series that I really never said out loud, but we're kind of transitioning back into school and fall. So this last episode to help us with that is how to lazy genius kid chores. Chores seem like a good anchor in the summer, but a huge part of routine in the fall. But how do we do it? Allowance or no allowance. Charts or no charts. How young is too young, how old is too old, all the things. So today I'm going to share how I do chores for my kids, but also how I think you can think about what matters and what doesn't in relation to kids chores. So you can create your own way that makes sense. First, a quick

If you have like, you have like three more days to give me some feedback on what you'd like to see in the future here at the lazy genius collective. There is a quick survey at the lazy genius collective.com slash feedback that'll be open until Wednesday, August 7th. And one random participant of that survey will get a free Planet Box rover lunchbox for a kid or for yourself. We have been using our Planet Box lunchboxes for six years now and there's as good as the day we first got them. They're just so great. They're bento box style lunch boxes that are stainless steel. They're absolutely amazing. My kids have never had a teacher who did not ask where we got them and that the lunchboxes are their favorite they've ever seen in the classroom. Seriously, every single teacher. I have three

kids and a cumulative like dozen years of kids in school. So it's a lot of, that's a lot of raiding teachers over these lunchboxes. So if you would like to, really, it's not about winning the lunchbox, I suppose, because there's only one. And hopefully. Hopefully more than one of you will fill out the survey, but it would be so helpful to get your feedback, and I would love to be able to say thank you by giving you one of those lunchboxes. So you can head to the lazy genius collective.com slash feedback, take a couple of minutes to give us your feedback, and maybe you'll win a new awesome lunchbox. And if you don't, I'm still just super grateful that you take the time. The feedback is going to shape the next year of content,

and so the more we know, the better it will be. Okay, let's talk about kids chores. There are three major things to decide. And it's important to decide. And it's important to them in the right order. And those three things in the right order are your priority, the actual chores, and then the system within which they happen. We like to start with systems with colorful chore charts and wondering if we do allowance or not. But if you don't name the priority and purpose behind your kids doing chores, none of that will work as well as it can. So priority, chores system. Let's start with priority. If I were to ask you, what's your purpose in having your kids do chores. I could probably safely guess your answer. It's to teach our kids life

skills and how to be self-sufficient, right? Hopefully, all of our kids will eventually move out and they need to know how to do their own laundry and wash dishes and all the things. It is our job as parents to teach our kids this, but it's super important, especially if your kids are younger, to name the priority within that purpose of teaching them life skills. Because here's the thing. If you want your little kids to get practice at doing chores and being self-sufficient, it's really hard to simultaneously hold a priority, that priority, and then I know the priority of things being done well. The more practice kids have it sweeping, the better they'll probably get. But we cannot hold both self-sufficiency in little kids and also excellence in actually doing

the task. If I have my first grader clean the toilet, I'm probably going to have to go back and clean the toilet myself if I want the toilet to be clean. so you have to kind of pick one. Self-sufficiency or a job well done. I'm not saying that if your priority is a job well done, that you shouldn't have your kids help. You just need to have the expectation that they'll do it, but you'll likely also have to do it

and not be angry or annoyed at them about it. I am very guilty of this. So I think it's a good reminder. I can't expect my kid to know how to vacuum the first time as little toddler arms give it a try. Patience, patience, patience. And leave time to go back after them. if a job well done is a priority.

That little mental shift makes such a big difference. Another offshoot of this idea of priority is how much teaching you actually do during the chore if you're good with the kid going through the motions or them figuring it out on their own. Okay, let's take laundry as an example. Okay, so my boys, they sort and fold and put away their own laundry. That's been many years in the making, so don't lose your minds on that. I showed them once or twice how to fold their shirts that honestly I don't really care if it gets done super well.

I like the fact that they're taking ownership and doing it themselves, even if it's not how I would do the task. So pay attention to how you marry the instruction of a chore and then how closely you need the kid to hold to that instruction. Maybe doing the task, no matter how they actually choose to do it is enough. Or maybe it's not. You get to choose. Just remember.

that if excellence and leaning into a certain method is a high priority for you, check your emotions and your responses towards your kid who's just learning and give yourself a little extra time to do the chore alongside them or after them. Okay, so once you know your priority, now it's time to pick the actual chores. If you have the priority of perfection, you should stick with super simple tasks. Give your kids a chance to meet your expectations. Give them easy wins so they don't feel like they can't do it.

something that feels too hard. The list of chore possibilities is enormous, especially like when you consider what rooms you have and like compared to somebody else on the internet who's talking about chores. If you only use claws to clean as opposed to chloroics wipes, like the variables kind of make it tough for me to give you a list of chores, but you can make your own list. And remember to start incredibly small. What things could your kids do in light of your priorities? For example, we don't often have many dishes to hand wash because we have a dishwasher and because I only cook meals that use limited dishes because washing a giant pile of pots and pans is not my favorite. But we'll usually have like a skillet and a knife to clean. Now as a reminder, my boys are nine

and seven and my daughter is three. I do not like cleaning up messes they leave behind when they do chores, especially things related to water. I don't know what it is, but it just makes my skin crawl and my fuse gets unnecessarily short when I have to clean up water mess. So guess what? My kids don't wash dishes. I haven't taught them that yet. I will when they get a little older and they recognize what happens to water when they splash it hard and they don't actually like getting their clothes wet and making you miss. But until that day, I will wash the dishes myself. So even though a certain chore is technically age appropriate, whatever that means, it doesn't mean your kid has to do it. Remember your priorities and then choose the chores that make the most sense for you and your kids. you can just write like all the chores out in one big list. And if you have kids or different ages, you could also make an individual list for each kid. Okay, so as an example,

here is kind of a snapshot of my kids' chore list. Now, this is not written anywhere for them to see. I'll explain how they see their chores in a minute. But these are things that my kids do. All the kids take their dirty dishes to the kitchen after a meal. That's low-hanging fruit to teach responsibility and teamwork. They put their dirty clothes in the hamper. again, that's super easy. The boys now sort and fold and put away their clean laundry. And my three-year-old

daughter will help me put the piles of clean laundry away. Sometimes we sort together. Sometimes we don't. I will give her a, like a Clorox wipe to wipe down a bathroom sink. That's super easy. She does a terrible job, but it's the motions, right? My boys, they love cleaning the windows because they like to spray the window cleaner. So they do that a lot and make a big mess. I have to be like, three sprays. Three sprays. That's that's all you had. They'll also clean toilets and wipe down sinks occasionally. I mean, they don't do a great job, but, you know, again, it's fine. They dust with a sock on their hands. They both really like to vacuum. So I let them do that all the time. Like, the other day, Ben just got the vacuum out when it was like family tidy time. And he started vacuuming. And I was like,

this is a magical moment. Mark it, Kendra. They're not great at sweeping, though. They're real bad at that coordination. We're working on it. Um, but not super fast because it doesn't matter that much. We will do a swiffer sometimes because that's like vacuum motions and that's fine. One of our favorite ways to keep their rooms from completely falling apart is to have them clean up a category of stuff. I will go into their room, locate like the biggest culprit, whether it's dirty clothes or like an emptied out dress up box or books strewn everywhere or something like that. And I'll just say, clean up all the books or put all the clothes in the hamperer. Kids don't always know what to do when you give them

big chore like clean your room or clean the bathroom, but saying pick up the dress up clothes or wipe down the inside of the sink makes a lot more sense to them. Like the more specific you are, the more they know what the expectations are. And it's, they don't get as distracted or overwhelmed. There's more to life than finding the perfect car. But finding the perfect car can help you get the most out of life. Like the SUV that handles everything from drop off to off road and the car that Hull's groceries and hockey teams, or the van that's gone from just practical to practically family. Whatever you want, wherever you're going, start your search at ototrater.ca. Canada's car marketplace.

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her name. So if this was your idea, will you please tell me in a DM on Instagram or something? So I can thank you and thank you right now. But we've been using this method for over six months now. And it is fantastic. It's called Daily Sheets. We have a little dry erase board on the fridge. It's divided in half, one side for Sam, one for Ben. I think once school starts back in a couple of weeks, we might give Annie a section two. The daily sheets are essentially a short list of tasks for each kid that changes every day. But I don't have to decide what's on there until that morning. Okay, so here are the daily sheet rules.

First, I try and limit the tasks on the daily sheet to three things. It's not overwhelming for the kids to see and for me to come up with. We don't write things like brush your teeth and get dressed because those are naturally part of our kids' rhythms. but every morning while I'm getting my coffee, I write three things in each kid's section on that dry erase board. I can think about the day ahead, what we have going on, how busy we're going to be, and I can decide what makes the most sense for our day. During the school year, one box was always put away all your school stuff because taking care of their lunch boxes and putting their homework folders back in their book bags. That was not, and might still not be. We'll see what school starts

back. That just really wasn't part of their rhythm. They just left everything out. and having to tell them those things over and over again, it just drives me bonkers. Now it's just part of the daily sheet and it gets done. Other things might be like wash the living room windows, clean up a category in your room, clean two toilets, pick up all the toys in the front yard, that kind of thing. Now if the day is super busy or I don't care too much about them doing a lot of chores, I will make the third one be something silly like kiss your mother. They crack up and they do it and then they check it off just like if I said sort the laundry.

Oh, and that reminds me, on days where one legitimate chore is more substantial, like soar the laundry and fold it and put it away like my kids do, and that can take them like a solid hour. I always make the third box something stupid, like kiss your mother or do a silly dance or something easy that makes them laugh or roll their eyes at me, but they're still in the rhythm of seeing three things on their daily sheets. And I just decide what those things are based on the day. Okay, so there are so many chore chart ideas. out there, and if something works for you, you should do it. I just know that if a system ties a specific task or chore to a specific day or there's any kind of like rotation to stick with, it won't happen. I can barely do that for my own rhythm of my own chores. So I'm not about to expect that to work for my kids. Now, you might be different. So you just do what works best for you. We've been using daily

sheets for over six months. And even though they started working immediately, I wanted to make sure they kept working before I told you about them. I swear by this way of doing things, of doing chores. It is so fantastic. Oh, one other important part about this. Okay, so our kids have screen time every day, but they don't get it unless they finish their daily sheets first. That's a helpful motivation for them. And I mentioned this in the episode about managing time in the summer, but on that same dry race board are their complaining tallies. They get five tallies a day, and every time they complain, they lose a tally. There's no argument or negotiation. It's just a physical warning card, right? And if they lose all five tallies, they lose screen time for the day. Now that'll come into

play more than a minute with the daily sheets. So hang on. Okay, so now to the final topic of money. How does money fit into your chores? It depends on your priority. I personally am of the mind that when you're part of a family, you help out. I don't get paid to clean the toilets, so I don't see why my kids should either. At the same time, one of our personal parenting priorities is to teach our kids how to manage their money well. I want them to learn that credit cards aren't magical wells of endless money, that everything has a price, even if they aren't the one paying it. How will our kids learn how to manage their money if they don't have any? So during the school year, this summer it didn't really happen and no one cared. So, you know, we add a component to the daily

sheets. Okay, so as a refresher, physically of that dry erase board, you can imagine. It has a section for each kid. It has their three chores, their three daily sheet chores, and their five complaining tallies. Okay, they only get screen time if they've completed their three chores and they still have at least one tally left. Now also, at the top of the dry erase board above each kid's section, each kid gets seven blocks, one for each day of the week. If they finish a day, where they did their chores and they still have tallies, they color in the box for that day. If they make it to the end of the week

and all seven blocks are colored in, they get $2 for the week. If they do that for all four weeks of the month, they get an extra $2 for a total of $10 for the month for doing all their chores, having a good attitude, actually keeping up with the daily sheet board, which is totally on them,

except for what I write every morning. They manage the board. They know that if they ask for screen time, will check the board. So the board is their responsibility to keep up with. They even erase their own tallyes when they complain. So I'd say that 10 bucks a month for a kid to take that kind of ownership and participating in the running of the house is super worth it. But you could pay whatever you want or not pay at all. You could use some other sort of incentive or reward or compensation or whatever. Again, this fits well within our priorities and it works. And we'll keep doing it until it doesn't. But you

have to do it for your own priorities and what works for you. One last thing. One last thing. things like I mentioned before some of the chores that they do like taking dishes to the kitchen and doing a family tidy a couple times today those do not count as daily sheet tasks those are just being a person in this home tasks the daily sheets are more things I'm trying to add into their daily rhythm rather than just kind of like a check-off validation of what they already do hopefully that makes sense okay so to recap start with your parenting priority why are you actually wanting to have your kids do chores, and then keep that in mind as you make decisions. Then think about the actual chores that make sense for those priorities.

And then don't decide on a system until you know those two things. Otherwise, the system will likely not work super well because it's just putting the cart before the horse. And that is how to lazy genius kids chores. If you have any questions or ideas that you want to share, you can do that in a couple places. You can leave a comment on the show notes of this episode on the website. You can leave a comment on Thursday's Instagram post, which will give you details about this week's Instagram live. And then third, you can join me on this week's Instagram live. I am at the lazy genius on Instagram and I will be there live around 1215 regular time this Thursday, Eastern time, to talk about the episode. So I hope you can join me there. Don't forget that you only

have a couple more days to enter to win a Planet Box lunchbox by participating in a short survey, but super, super helpful. Mighty, mighty powerful. What is that phrase? Tiny but tiny but mighty. Is that a thing? If it is, we just said so. You can find it at the lazy genius collective.com slash feedback. I'm really, really excited to learn from what you guys like and don't like and make this next year of content even better for you. So super pumped. Thanks for taking the time to fill that out. All right. Until next time, be a genius about the things that matter and lazy about the things that don't. I'm Kendra and I'll see you next week. like you were living just a B or B plus life, it's so dangerous to live that.

More dangerous than a B minus or a C plus life, because when you're living a B or B plus life, you don't change it. You think it's good enough. Is it? I'm Susie Welch. I host a podcast called Becoming You. People think, okay, an A plus life is not available to me, but there is a way. We are all in the process of becoming ourselves.

Listen to Becoming You wherever you get your podcasts.