Families with 3 or more children and both parents work...

[Metherdick]

If you are a family with three or more children and both parents work, how do you divide up the chores/mental load? How many hours do you spend on an evening and at the weekend doing chores? Is your house clean and tidy?? If so, what are your strategies to achieve this??? Just feeling at the end of my tether with it all, just washing all the bedding/ school uniforms on a Saturday feels like an all day job. My husband says he can't take on anymore but we are struggling to keep on top of everything...I believe that other families are able to maintain a better standard than we are managing. For reference, children are 1 toddler and 2 of secondary age. Thanks!

I’ve spent my entire Sunday so far just getting uniforms and pe kits washed, beds changed, bathrooms cleaned, kitchen floor etc... luckily the children have played nicely in and out of the garden in order for me to crack on. I work school hours so have a bit more time in the week to catch up on life admin and ferry children around. Watching for tips !!

We have a cleaner. She saves us a lot of time. So the only thing we have to do is laundry.

How long does your cleaner come for @UrsulaTee?

Put a wash on every morning get one of the secondary age kids to hang it out on airer and sort the dry washing. Older kids can help hoover and get them learning how to do simple dinners. Spread the chores out if you can amongst the family it shouldn’t all be you.

Batch cook where possible so easy dinners from the freezer.
At least a load of laundry done a day.
Older kids have one job to do a day, hoover, fold or hang up washing etc. A few hours at the weekend are put aside for cleaning and everyone chips in. I'll usually start with ironing and get it out of the way.
Everyone is involved, we all live here, we all contribute to the cleaning needing done.

We have 3+ children and work full time. I also study.

House is clean and tidy as in no one will get ill from it. It’s not as organised as some are nor is it show home standard.

When I have done the organised mum method it has helped.

Do you have to wash all bedding weekly? We do laundry throughout the week too.

Need to get your teens doing chores.

Household admin mostly me.

My house is usually a mess, my washing basket is never empty.
I don't expect it to get any better until youngest starts school.

@Metherdick

How long does your cleaner come for *@UrsulaTee*?

3 hours and does the whole house and changes bedding. It’s worth every penny of the £30 a week it costs us.

Will look up the Organised mum method. An organised couple method though would be even better

If 2 are secondary school age then I would be expecting a lot of help from them too.

We have 3 primary school age and both parents work a lot. Now dh is wfh most of the time he gets a lot done during the day between meetings and calls - swapping washing machine over to tumble for eg and emptying dishwasher or bins.

The dc have to collect clean clothes from the utility where it is out into piles for them and they have to put it away every day. Their rooms have to be tidy with any overnight drinks brought down each morning. Shoes, coats and bags go away whenever they come in. They have to clean up after meals and stack any dirty stuff in (not just near) the dishwasher and they empty out their own packed lunches and help with making them for the next day. The oldest changes her own bedding, I help the middle and dh and I do the rest.

We all have 'half hour' chunks over the weekend where we set alexa timers and go a bit nuts repatriating gubbins around the house and all pitching in.

It's tedious, relentless and boring keeping a house tucking over. We are a team and I will not tolerate laziness or exploitation.

We have bought a light weight hoover so the kids can do their own rooms and the landings for us. I want a robo hoover to keep on top of the downstairs gruft but they're a bit pricy for the moment.

4 children, dh works full time, I work school hours. Youngest dd has additional needs. I feel like we're drowning!! Can't afford a cleaner at the moment though. Just wanted to empathise op.

If 2 are secondary age, that's 4 people capable of tackling everything that needs to be done.

You might need to review who does what when it comes to the kid's chores.

My children do their own laundry, we have a tumble dryer, and no one irons anything. Those all really help. I'm no longer overwhelmed with sorting and folding laundry.

We have 3 primary age dc and both work full time. We have a cleaner who comes once a week and changes one child's bed sheets each week. We change our own every 2 weeks.

We do a load of washing every day. We put it on a timer overnight so it's finished when we get up. One of us hangs out the washing whilst the other one gets the kids ready for school.

We take it in turns to cook in the evening and all eat together. One of us does the kitchen tidy whilst the other does bed time. Once the two younger ones are in bed, we get everything ready for the next day (packed lunch, uniform, school books etc), say good night to the older one and then we watch an hour or so of TV and go to bed.

I mainly take on the mental load of planning our weekends etc and anything adhoc but DH owns boring admin like the car service and MOT, kids dentist/optician appts.

Its hard work and the weekends fly by. I do sometimes wish I could work 4 days a week but we're trying to pay down our mortgage at the moment so focusing on that.

How much do your older children do? You'll be doing them a favour if you encourage them to make them take on tasks for themselves. For example, they can clean their own rooms, do their own washing, learn to cook and feed themselves. They will eventually thank you, as will their future partners.

Also make sure your DH pulls his weight. So many women and men, feel that a woman has to do the lion's share of the housework.

We have 4 kids all close together. they are older now but when they were younger it was exhausting. We worked around each other , me doing mostly weekends and nights. Chores divided equally, dh has always more than pulled his weight and done childcare.

Our house isn't show house worthy, but it's good enough that we can whizz round in an hour to get it visitor ready.

Older ones (12 & 10) do the dishwasher, hoovering and help tidying. All responsible for own bedrooms including changing beds. Toddler 'helps'. I do pretty much all the mental load + cooking. We share clothes washing. DH does all cleaning, garden, bins etc.

We are planning to get a cleaner in September when the toddler's free childcare hours kick in.

@Metherdick

Will look up the Organised mum method. An organised couple method though would be even better

@Metherdick agree but she called it that when she was a single mum many years ago. Definitely one for all the family.

Ha ha @CroydianSlip, the repatriating gubbins is my absolute bug bear

My ds1 can be helpful, will cook or help out with cooking a meal, loads and unloads the dishwasher, strips and makes his bed, irons his uniform. I don't think he's doing enough though as he has loads of leisure time. Ds2 is pretty unhelpful around the house as well as being the main culprit behind the strewing/dirty marks on the walls. He is good with the toddler though and watches him while I get on with stuff like cooking, remembering how awful that time of day was when the eldest two were tiny I do appreciate that. But I don't feel either of them do as much to help as the work they create. Dh says he can't do any more and his job is more demanding than mine (both wfh at the moment and I'm slightly better paid ). I do all the laundry, probably 80% of the mental load, 100% of the purchasing and getting rid of / selling stuff (we are slowly renovating the house so quite a bit of homeware stuff plus stuff for the kids etc), all the food shopping, meal planning etc and most of the cleaning except the kitchen (shared by the other three) and they do most of the hoovering. Cooking is shared. It's the tidying and keeping on top of the organisation and laundry that's the worst, just utterly relentless and feels like groundhog Day doing the same stuff every day

My boys are adult now, but when I had 3 at home I found fulltime very difficult. Most people I know who had 3 worked part-time if at all possible - I did until youngest was about 9, then went full time ( teacher). It was a nightmare. I wouldn't recommend it if you value your physical and mental health.
As you say, just the washing takes forever, and then you've still got cleaning, shopping, organising , sleeping etc.
If you work fulltime, can you buy in help? Bedding/shirts could go to a laundry service, maybe get a cleaner? Put all the DC on school dinners? Then the evening meal doesn't need to be a big deal - could be cheese on toast/beans/fishfingers sometimes.
My Dh really didn't help enough, but he was doing insociable, unpredictabe shifts and had health issues.. it meant the lion's share fell to me.
I did a laundry load when I first got up, hung it out after school run before going to work ( pre-teaching days!) I tried to do lunches and have a clean kitchen before going to bed, and did meal planning/shopping list on the bus or dictate it to an older DC whilst cooking. DC had chores ( although getting them to keep on top of them was a source of stress) and we had enough uniform for a week for each child.
It's just a really hard time...I longed for staff! A relative actually had a live-in nanny AND didn't work herself, was very hard not to compare!

@Babyroobs that sounds utterly exhausting! You should feel a real sense of achievement having maintained that. This makes me feel so inadequate, why are we not able to manage? The situation (4 people old enough to muck in), it should be attainable to get the house to a decent standard

I'd draw up a chart on excel with 15 hour blocks in it, so 7 am til 10pm for the 4 of you. Block out when people are asleep across the week. Block out the hours you're working / kids are commuting and attending school. Block out the time the kids are expected to be studying. Then fill in the chores.
If ds1 cooks once a week full in the relevent block on his chart. If ds1 watches the baby an hour each day fill that in at the relevant time etc. so you can see what time you're all doing work / have free. That way DH will see how much more leisure time he's getting than you. Frankly if he still refuses to do anything to help in his home with his kids, I'd be reducing what I do for him. So leave his washing, you're too busy etc

When he's not traveling DH does all the meal planning, food shopping and cooking. So that's 50-75% of the time.

When he's away I quite often order pre-cooked food for the family so I don't have to cook. Or I get each teen to make one meal that week.

My kids have school dinners - I long ago gave up making lunches.

As I said above everyone does their own laundry. I don't tidy their rooms or nag them to do it - I leave them to it. DS's room always has overflowing baskets of clean clothes. He's happy so I leave him to it.

We share things like cleaning bathrooms, vacuuming, dishes, feeding animals, emptying bins. Whoever didn't cook clears up dinner.

They don't make much mess in our shared areas so there isn't much tidying to do, but if you have a toddler then I remember how it feels endless.

Mental load is shared much more evenly than it used to be. It's pretty common for DH to be emailing or calling the school about stuff for the kids even if he's working 1000 miles away, or researching holiday ideas/flights.

He manages this alongside a very stressful job, because he doesn't have the option not to, I guess.

He also does a lot of DIY but that can be pretty stressful, and we are starting to outsource that more eg we recently had someone install a window for us, where in the past he'd have done it himself.

The kids do stuff like mow lawns and help with bigger gardening jobs like spreading a trailer full of mulch, chopping and stacking wood, taking out trees.

Looking at this, I'm wondering what I actually do...