Family Home Evening

So we've had lots of struggles with the kids lately about helping out around the house and doing chores and stuff. Tonight for FHE we'll talk abou them and why we have chores and responsibilities and lay down a new plan to help motivate everyone.

I’ve been looking at websites and reading up on different things and ideas that people have about chores and what kids can be expected to do. I think we need to actually look at it as three different levels of “work/chores” so to speak.

1- Individual responsibility- individual chores the kids are expected to do and receive some form of positive encouragement for their individual accomplishment
2- Child led group responsibility- Something the kids are asked to do together and work and accomplish together for a group reward.
3- Family responsibility- larger things that the kids can’t do on their own, more items that we need to accomplish, but by involving the kids in it they learn the reward of working together and accomplishing a job and they learn the skills to do it on their own in the future.


1-For individual responsibility- I’m making new chore charts, I’ve been reading about age appropriate chores for kids, and I know since the kids aren’t doing much now we need to work up and start the better habits and practices for them- so I was trying to figure out some chores that I think it would be reasonable for us to ask them to do.

I think we will have a “family council” of sorts and let them have input on what chores they should be doing.

I was thinking with Alex and Ashley they can have the responsibility of making their bed, putting dirty clothes in the hamper, and putting away their clean clothes. I also thought that they could each have one or two nights where they help clean up from dinner.

With Alyssa I thought we could have her make her bed and put her dirty clothes in the hamper, and I think during the day I would have her help unload the dishwasher. I can start doing that earlier in the day and then it’s all ready to be loaded in the evening.


2-For the child led group responsibility- I was thinking is that the kids need to have an incentive for cleaning up- or it just becomes me yelling and randomly taking away privileges from them and we all get frustrated. They love to play games so much, and I thought if I give them the incentive to clean up before dinner each night- then perhaps we can play a family game each night after dinner/before bed, or read a book together or something? My other thought was that dessert would be dependent on finishing the chores for the day, but that is more of an individual thing and doesn’t encourage them to just work together to clean up the living room- the goal of playing a family game might. Also I don’t know that we need to tie dessert as a reward for doing chores.

3-For the family one was that once a month we could have a “family cleaning” where we choose something that needs to be cleaned up as a family and work on it together- that could be cleaning the garage together, weeding the flower bed, catching up on house cleaning- doing the windows or baseboards or blinds that I never can seem to get to on my own.



Rich asked me where I found the above stuff and I had to tell him that it’s kind of bits and pieces from different places. I was initially looking up age appropriate chores- and came across different chore charts that listed what age appropriate chores different sites recommended. I looked at them and decided ones that I thought would work for our kids. There were actually more chores on the charts for Alex and Ashley, but I thought I needed to work with some simple things first and then add to their charts after the basic habits were started. Most of the sites advocate some form of allowance tied to chores, and I can see the benefit of that, but didn’t want to have all of the responsibilities tied to an allowance (whether monetary or paid in tv/x-box/computer time allowances). So while I was reading through that stuff I knew that I still needed to find some way to get the kids to cooperate and help clean up more general things and make it be a group goal instead of just an individual goal of accomplishing their chore to get their allowance.

Then I started thinking about how to put “clean your rooms” on the charts. For Alex it’s pretty simple and straightforward- the mess in his room is from him, but with Ashley it isn’t as simple. The mess isn’t always from her and it really isn’t fair to expect her to clean up her room all the time on her own when 70% of the mess is from Alyssa and Angela. So I got to thinking about the times when the kids really do clean up well and work together. Usually it’s before we do something and they are motivated to clean up so we can go somewhere or something. Right when I’m making dinner and before you get home really seems to me to be the time for me to motivate them to clean up, and then after dinner the cleaning will be done and we can play games and stuff- the thing is you and I have to be in agreement and willing to sit and play the games or read the book - whatever motivating factor we decide to give them before it is too late and time to get ready for bed.

I was also searching through the LDS site for some articles or something to help me base my lesson on, and I ran across tons of articles on working together as a family on chores and goals and the closeness that that creates which helps as the kids get older and stuff and thought that that is another thing we need to start trying to do more.

So I was trying to figure out which “philosophy” so to speak to try and focus on tonight, and then I thought- well why do I have to choose just one? Why can’t we just separate it into individual, group and family responsibilities and talk about how we have to learn and do things individually sometimes, and as a group other times and with the family- it can be a lot of fun to work together and accomplish a job.

So... hopefully I'll be able to convey to the kids tonight what I've been able to type up. Because on paper it looks good, but I know getting things from paper- to mesh and make sense in kids brains- isn't always easy. ;)