It’s a New Year and probably a good time to reevaluate age-appropriate chores and allowances for your kids. We will run through chore chart options, set age-appropriate chores, and how to structure allowance pay. Don’t have kids? Maybe it is time to evaluate whether you and your partner have an equal division of household responsibilities. This might not be a bad idea if you do have kids. Ever heard of the silent load? In this first drop ill cover chore charts and age-appropriate chores.
Chore Chart
Our household uses a chore chart for allowances. We were gifted the Melissa and Doug Mickey Mouse chore chart for our oldest a couple of years ago. It works great, but the big drawback is that is really only designed for one kid. We have worked around this by strategically using the 7 slots on the chore chart. The top three are reserved for “shared” responsibilities. These are responsibilities that they both need to do or are reserved for promoting behaviors of getting along. Examples of shared responsibility could be feeding the pet, the kids either are responsible for every other day or maybe one gets water and fills the food bowl. We also use this for getting along goals such as sharing and using kind words with one another. It has helped us to instill we win together and we lose together. If they cannot work together and help one another out, there is no reward for that day.
“The best predictor of young adults’ success in their mid-20’s was that they participated in household tasks when they were three or four.” - Marty Rossman
The back of the chore chart is magnetic for easy storage of the pieces, but I prefer to keep them in a box. After I assign the share goals, each kid is assigned two age-appropriate individual chores each week. This helps us hone in on something each kid needs to work on or should be doing to help around the house. It might be a hygiene goal for younger kids, such as brushing their teeth. This chart also has blank magnets to write your own chores if one of the pre-determined ones does not work. Do not forget to use the customizable ones for chores that might not come around weekly. Think about refilling soap dispensers, helping bring up seasonal décor, and hosing down outside furniture. You have to figure out what success looks like, and some of that will depend on the age of your kids. For me, hygiene goals such as brushing teeth must be met daily. For other ones such as making the bed, we just aim for twice a week at any time. It is up to her what days and when she does it, but I find that usually by Wednesday she sees she has not gotten a magnet and makes a conscious effort to complete the task. Be self-aware of your own short fallings as well. It would not be fair if you do not sit down to dinner as a family every night, but they have a daily task to set and clear the table. We both work full time and sometimes there are meals of convenience. Maybe you are a stay-at-home parent, but on some days you have kids with heavy activities and logistically that’s not realistic. Be flexible with the chore, maybe instead of clearing the table, it’s taking care of your own trash. Ultimately structure this however you see fit, but from experience, the responsibility chart will never have to be full for our kids to earn their allowance. Kids will have good and bad days, but it’s a good visual reminder of their responsibilities and takes some of the emotion out of it. Struggling with some age-appropriate chore ideas? See below.
Finally, to tie chores into allowance, each week I access the chores and give out a target of total magnets each kid should have. In order for you to earn an allowance, you must have X magnets. It will be the shared target plus their individual target. Allowance is a great way to teach kids several lessons, budgeting, taxes, and the meaning of fair. I will cover this all in the allowance post-dropping soon.
One final disclaimer: Our chore chart's magnets are tiny choking hazards and having a young one we did have to move where we hung this so it was out of his reach and store them in bins vs the back of the chart. Chore charts do not have to be fancy, this can always be done with paper and stickers, dry-erase/chalkboards. I will link my chart and a couple of other best-sellers and easy options below.
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