How to make chores fun for everyone
Wash, dry, pack, sweep, sleep, repeat. Chores just never seem to end – even as adults. For children, it can also seem like a cyclical nightmare of less playtime. However, doing chores doesn’t need to feel like one, and in fact, there’s a lot of good to come from it.
In a 2016 article published by the Japanese Society of Public Health, it was found that in one of the 1 719 subjects studied, it was children who experienced good home environments that engaged in positive lifestyle factors, good dietary behaviours and good health practices such as exercising regularly and sleeping enough every night.
What Makes A Good Home Environment?
The same study analysed whether parents were employed, if the family ate meals together, and if they engaged in chores together.
Where children were exposed to less time with their parents, they experienced lower health-satisfaction levels, lower ‘feeling good’ moods when waking up, higher agitation levels and a stronger need for self-affirmation.
Without family activities – such as chores – children experienced their day-to-day lives lacking in positive and healthy practices. The remedy? Chores.
Aim For The Target Centre
Be specific about chores: don’t just give the command of ‘clean your room’, which may seem like a huge task and will deter them from wanting to do it.
Instead, break up chores into smaller, specific parts that can be easily attained. For example, ‘Put away your shoes’, ‘hang your clothes’ or ‘pick up your toys and put them away.’
Putting all the big-wordy research behind us, how do we go about making chores fun? We want to increase our children’s happiness and self-affirmation, but we also know that asking them to sweep their room is tricky. So why not try:
1. Turning it into a game or competition.
2. Making it a scavenger hunt.
3. Giving your children their own equipment.
4. Allowing them to mimic you.
5. Working as a team.
6. Playing pretend, playing music, taking a silliness break.
Give Them Tasks That Give Love
Baking a cake, laying the table for the family, helping to calm the younger sibling. Young kids love being the ‘grown-up’ for a while.
We Are Playing, Not Working
Who doesn’t love a good game? And you’d be a liar if you said you don’t engage in play to some degree as an adult. You could do a ‘draw-a-chore’ game where you write different chores onto strips of paper, put them into a box, shake them up, and get everyone to draw one chore.
You can mix it up by adding something silly like ‘do 10-star jumps’, or playing a game of basketball where kids throw their soft toys into their storage container. Another idea is to do a scavenger hunt where kids must collect all the listed items and return them to their boxes before time runs out – reverse psychology? I think so.
Teamwork Is Fun
Playing ‘House-House’ is a go-to way for practising your household skills. Pretend you are contestants on MasterChef, or that you’re racing against the clock to clean up the place before Gordon Ramsay comes waltzing through the door. This way, you work as a team to get everything done and dusted.
Plus, it’ll feel like less of a chore and more like you’re spending time together doing something important. You could give your children their own equipment like a broom, a duster, their own drying cloth or a little dustbin to throw trash away in.
Be Silly
Talking in silly voices is sometimes such a game-changer! And it’s even better when you’re giving orders in a silly way. Imagine saying ‘sweep your room’ in Yoda’s voice and mannerisms.
Crank up the music and get dancing while you’re baking, cooking or doing other (safe) chores (best not to be dancing while your five-year-old is holding a fragile porcelain dish). Don’t be shy to let your children mimic you; it’s what they’re best at. It’ll help them learn useful life skills like cooking and baking.
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Text by: Saadiqah Schroeder
Images: Gallo Images/Getty Images, Shutterstock
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