and beyond? How do we avoid the nagging (ours) and the rolling eyes (theirs)?
Certainly our own personal relationship with chores has a bearing on how we present them to our children; if we consider them to be boring and tedious, it’s hard not to transfer this message. I’ll never forget coming in from school – I must have been about twelve years of age – to my little sister, then three years old, playing with her toy iron and board next to my mother who was doing the real thing – the family’s ironing. My sister caught my eye as she wielded her toy iron menacingly and muttered, frowning, ‘Bloody ironing.’ Fortunately, my mum saw the funny side!
However, the same point is relevant to personal chores too. As Steve Biddulph points out in his recent book, Raising Girls, our children definitely take in and will eventually make our attitudes their own – whether we sing while we shower or enjoy putting on our clothes, or whether we frown, stress, grump and hurry our way through life.
Many parents find that older children can be encouraged to complete chores through rewards, praise and recognising the feeling of satisfaction of knowing they’ve completed a task well. My husband, to this day, will be first to offer to put clean covers on the duvets. He puts this enthusiasm down to the fact that when he was about ten years old his mum told him how good and quick he was at it; we are still reaping the rewards of this great, and possibly honest, note of encouragement.
Younger children have different motivational drives though. If we can tap into their intrinsic desire to be kind, busy, productive and playful we really can make chores more than bearable, and actually – wait for it – fun. This is how chores have become my first way to play for toddlers and preschoolers.
Chores aren’t bores; they’re a way to play
By changing the way we present household tasks – not as mundane, boring jobs that need to be done, but as opportunities for playful activity – they can instead be seen as a way to spend quality time with our children. This is especially useful for busy working parents for whom chores and playtime with their children have to exist in the same concentrated period of time.
The key to integrating chores into playtime is to stop thinking that household tasks have to be isolated, parental tasks.
Ways to play and chores for preschoolers
Here are some points to keep in mind when trying to get preschoolers involved in chores:
The most common question that parents ask is what exactly is the appropriate age to a) introduce chores, and b) what kinds of chores should children actually be able to complete at specific ages.
If you think of chores as a way to play then you can introduce them from as early an age as you like. As for the actual complexity of the chore, well, of course that will depend on the age of your child, their specific abilities, their dexterity, their maturity and the set up of your home. But by making a job a game, in fact all areas of chore-work can be happily accessed by children as young as two. In some cases they will, of course, simply be playing alongside you while you complete the task, but on occasion they may be able to contribute to the actual outcome in some way. The point is, by making chores fun the domestic tasks get done, your child is happily involved, they don’t learn that chores are tedious and something to avoid at all costs, they practise important life skills and numerous other skills with you through playful activity and you get some quality time together.
Below, I’ve listed the main household chores. I’ve grouped them according to how frequently they might need to be carried out, but, of course, this varies in every home.
Everyday – or most frequent – chores:
Laundry
Less-frequent chores:
Cleaning the car
The Mary Poppins Approach
What better way to explain chores as a way to play than to refer to the wonderful cleaning queen
