How to Get Your Kids to Help With Chores

Oh, chores. That inevitable fact of life that never seems to go away no matter how old we get. Most of us have been doing chores since we were children—and now it’s time to pass of that torch to our own children. Getting your kids to participate in chores around the house isn’t always easy. Here we have for you our top tips for getting your kids to help with chores. It just might take a little convincing and possible bribery at first, but we assure you that getting your kids to help with chores can be done!

Written by Single Mom Spot™, we thought that this article would be especially relevant for our single mom community. Chores are a great way to get your children involved in the household so that they learn how they can be a positive contributor in their own home. Chores provide a great sense of community, responsibility and connection to the household.

Five tips for getting your kids to help with chores…

Start small and go from there

If you want to get your kids to help with chores, you must start small and progress gradually. Kids usually aren’t eager to clean, so this can take some convincing. This is especially true if you have toddlers. But the good thing is, the sooner you teach your kids how to help you with chores, the better. Kids need to learn responsibility, and the sooner you teach this life skill to them, the sooner you can have them helping you with chores around the house.

You can keep it small and simple if your kiddos are young. For example, putting their used dish in the sink, putting away their toys after using them, and making their beds each morning is a great way to start. Kids often love praise, so be sure to praise them at first for a job well done while they get the hang of it. Then, over time, you can add new chores to the list and stop praising for the ones that become lifelong daily habits. Some other important factors to consider is the time of the day for these chores to be done, as well as set expectations for them. Consider your kiddos cranky times as well as clearly setting your expectations for the chores so there’s little confusion and less crankiness.

Make it a bonding experience

When teaching your kids to help you with chores around the house, think of it as a way for the two of you to bond together. You can tell Alexa to play some good tunes, turn on a favorite Disney film, or dance around and keep things light as the two of you tackle making the house tidy. My children and I love to dance and listen to music while we clean, and making it fun makes it feel like less of a chore in the process.

Reward them in clever ways

Kids love praise—and they always love prizes and presents, too! On Saturdays when we do most of our deep cleaning around the house, this can take a few hours from start to finish with all of us contributing. I will often ask them of a reward that they’d like to share together, which is typically Chick-fil-A. So, my girls will work hard on cleaning because going to a drive-thru is a huge treat for them and not something we ever do regularly. Reserve special occasion things as way to treat your kids for a job well done cleaning up around the house.

Consider allowance for chores completed

Allowance is not something that all parents do, and that’s for good reason. Kids shouldn’t just be given money on a regular basis without earning it because this goes against teaching them how to be responsible and accountable for their actions. However, I will reward my children monetarily if they babysit their much younger brother for a short period of time. (They will never get a penny from me for walking their dogs they just had to have though, lol!)

 Should you decide that allowance is something that is ideal for you and your kids to help them complete their chores, keeping a chore chart is a great way to dole out responsibilities to the littles in the house. You can use a dry erase board or even download a chore chart to print out and pin up or place on the refrigerator. Keeping this visible where all eyes can see it is a great way to keep your kids accountable for their assigned chores. And, if you have multiple kids in your life, switch up the chores every so often to keep things fresh and kids less grumpy about their routine responsibilities around the home.

Single Mom Spot™ is an online community for single moms that promotes real, offline change.

Do you have any tips of your own to share on how you get your kids to help around with chores around the home?

We’d love to hear what they are, leave us a comment and share!