Teaching Kids 2 Clean pt. 4

The theme of this month is “Kids and Cleaning”. This month, we will discuss ways to teach your kids about responsibility through cleaning and how empowering it can be for children to help out around the house. We cover all sorts of topics, so please keep coming back and send us a message if there is a topic you’d like to see us write about in the future!

This series has four parts. For your convenience, I’ll post a bullet point synopsis at the beginning of each post so you can skim, skip ahead, or cherry pick according to your little heart’s desire!

1st post: About me/my qualifications, reasons why a child should learn to clean.

2nd post: How to get started, they will follow

3rd post: Scheduled game plan

4th post: Rewards and consequences

We’ve talked about so much and this is the last post of this little series. Today, we are going to talk about the importance of rewards and consequences as you’re going through this process.

The Power of Habit by Charles Duhigg is our featured book fo the month and a great resource for anyone wanting to create lasting habits. Read it. I mean it.

We don’t typically do anything without a reason, even if the reason is subconscious. More times than not, everything we commit our time and effort to involves rewards and consequences. I’d like to encourage you to create a consequence system that reinforces the importance of the specific chore.

For a small child, you might say, “Oh no. You didn’t want to pick up the toys before nap, so instead of playtime, we are going to have pick up time after nap. We can try again and if you pick up quickly, you might have time to play before we start dinner. You can choose to pick up or sit in the corner until you are willing to.”

For a teenager you might say, “Oh no. You didn’t make dinner for the family tonight. Looks like Dad and I will have take out and you can crackers. If you’d rather have something more delicious, you’ll need to allow more time for preparing dinner like we agreed.”

You get the idea. Let the punishment fit the crime.

Parenting with Love and Logic by Foster Cline does a brilliant job of explaining how you can empower your child (or teen) to make decisions and anticipate cause and effect based consequences.

This principle doesn’t only apply to teaching your children to clean a home or even exclusively to cleaning. Whether you want to lose some weight, quit smoking, save for a vacation, or even just become the kind of girl who lights candles in the evening (that was my goal one year), it all starts with consistently creating habit building practices with a sound reward and consequence system.

That concludes our little series on teaching kids to clean. I hope you’ve enjoyed it!