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Monday, September 7, 2015

Family Work: No More Chore Systems

We have very few assigned chores in our house these days, and the house is getting cleaner. I spent years creating charts and systems for chores. I tried laminated cards and a flipbook and sticker charts. I offered incentives and consequences. It was exhausting, and no plan ever lasted longer than six month before I needed to reinvent the wheel.

A few years ago I learned about the concept of family work. Basically, giving up assigned chores and replacing them with working side by side as a family. Where we used to go off in separate directions and work on individual tasks, we now work together more closely. When I first heard about this way of approaching the work I was skeptical. Wouldn't the house just become a disaster? Could this really work better for us than stickers and incentives? Even though I was unsure about the outcome, I decided to give it a try. After all, it had been about six months since the last chore chart upheaval. 

So we began. My oldest two children were capable of working independently, but my younger two still needed a lot of hands on, side by side direction. In fact, my youngest was so unable and unwilling to concentrate that she would only work if I was right by her side. (She was still pretty young.) The transition to family work was difficult at first, because I learned that my children really didn't know how to work. Even though my older two were capable, they still sometimes needed help to know what to do and how to do it. The truth is that I was doing a lot more teaching than I had in the past, because I was seeing that my children needed help as we worked together. The children weren't used to looking at a space and thinking about what to do next. Honestly, the house got a bit worse before it got better.

But. I saw that my children were actually gaining the skills that I was hoping they would gain. They were slowly starting to realize that our home was a stewardship for all of us. I could see them starting to do better about keeping areas clean, rather than just leaving messes because an area wasn't their responsibility. 

We've been keeping at this family work thing for a couple of years now. We do have a few assigned chores that occur daily and are easy enough to remember that we don't have to use charts. We work together, or at least at the same time, to make our house clean. Family work has decreased the stress for me and increased the personal responsibility and cleanliness.

Still have questions? Check out my follow up posts on Family Work: Nuts and Bolts and Problem Behaviors and Some Ways to Approach Them. 

7 comments:

  1. That is so neat! I love it! I have noticed that my kids love to feel part or involved in what I am doing, rather than having their own responsibilities. I love that the family way teaches them their stewardship towards their home. Thank you for sharing!

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  2. You're welcome. It took some time at first for everyone to get used to the new normal, but I'm so glad we kept it up.

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  3. So how does this work? You look at the family room and it is a disaster. Do you all go in and start cleaning it? Or the table? What about if it needs to be vaccumed as well, who does that? Can we get some more specifics on application please

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    1. I've had a number of people ask for specific logistics on social media as well. I am planning to write a follow up post with some more specifics, but the short answer is that it depends. I have some suggestions based on what we have done and I will share those in my follow up post on Thursday, but I think that every family will be different. Each family will also evolve and change as the children get older. Yes, we do sometimes walk into the room and all start cleaning the family room or table. Other times we divide it up. I also have some ideas on how to handle reluctant children, because mine were quite reluctant at first. Please stay tuned for my next post on Thursday.

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  4. I finally gave up on charts and stickers and incentives, too. It was too hard to keep track of and I hated it. We now have more of a family work model and our house really does stay cleaner, and there's a whole lot less griping from everyone when it's time to work! Thanks for writing about this!

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    1. I'm glad to hear from a fellow family work proponent! Isn't it awesome?

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  5. I finally gave up on charts and stickers and incentives, too. It was too hard to keep track of and I hated it. We now have more of a family work model and our house really does stay cleaner, and there's a whole lot less griping from everyone when it's time to work! Thanks for writing about this!

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