How to Get Kids to Help at Home

About the Book

In How To Get Kids to Help at Home, Elva Anson shows how parents can use ordinary household tasks to make their children capable, responsible, and independent adults — in only eighteen short years. It’s a struggle for nearly every family, but with these guidelines you really can get your kids to help at home. And what’s even better, they will probably like it.

Table of contents:

Born Dependent

• Understanding the problem
• How we keep children dependent
• Doing chores is more for them than for you

“You’ve Got Too Much Potential” Is an Empty Statement

• Support must precede a challenge
• The importance of confidence and how to increase it
• Encouragement – the key to growth
• Concentrate on who the child is, not on who he can become
• Think small – a child is not a miniature adult
• Give your child the benefit of the doubt

Home Is the Classroom for Learning Basic Skills

• If you are a parent, you must be a teacher
• Characteristics of a good teacher
• “Do as I do” is more important than what I say
• Teachers to each other
• Setting up the curriculum
• Learning means making mistakes
• When significance is distorted
• Work yourself out of a job

Who Does What and Who Decides

• Family meetings – the center of learning
• Format of a family meeting
• Family consensus about household standards
• Assessing the work load
• Making plans – chore charts and other creative ideas
• Back to the drawing board

Begin at the Beginning – Young Children

• Begin at the beginning if you can
• Young children love to help
• Make your home child-functional
• Chore ideas for children under six
• Chore chart ideas for young children

“Catch Me if You Can” – Juniors

• Age of mastery – six through twelve
• What you can expect
• Chore ideas for children six through twelve
• Chore chart ideas for juniors

“I Have Too Much Else to Do” – Teens

• Understanding your teen
• Responsibility, adaptability, flexibility
• Teaching the teen
• Chore charts for teens

Make Work Easy

• Simplify
• Get rid of clutter
• Teach principles that cut down work
• Organizational skills make work easier
• Provide easy-to-use, functional tools

Bribes, Allowances, and Other Compensation

• The pitfalls of manipulating children with bribes
• Use motivators and incentives creatively
• Inspections that encourage and teach
• The value of natural and logical consequences
• The big debate – should we pay children to help
• Use allowances to teach responsibility

Values – The Foundation for Training

• Know what you believe
• Recognize and promote differences
• Teach time management
• Children learn through play as well as work
• Teaching right from wrong