To ask how to teach children about chores and tidying?

[MrsJorahMormont]

I am a lifelong messy hoarder - child of messy hoarders. I am working really hard to change this and am making progress.

We have a DD aged 3 and I want to start getting her into good habits now but I'm not sure how to go about it or what age appropriate tasks are. She puts her shoes in her shoe box after nursery and we encourage her to tidy up her toys but is there anything else we should be doing?

If you raised tidy, organised, clutter free kids - how did you do it?!

Same as others putting toys away, plates in sink, clothes in wash etc. Also 'helping' me clean, put washing away etc even though it created more work as it needed redoing once she was in bed. With toys I never asked for one thing to go away before the next came out, unless it was a space issue. Too much tidying and effort to keep the house neat puts them off in my experience. When dd was little my house was the type you rarely saw floor or table surface till just before bed. But cos she helped tidy up, she didn't get stuff out for the sake of it. Also had stuff like those plastic drawers so it was easier for her, and toys were organised so no set/ activity involved emptying everything out to find them. Mainly though watching me, eg stuff like clearing a cupboard/ drawer when it needed doing. At 11 she's not obsessively neat to the point it spoils fun, but she's tidy and organised.

I used mop the kitchen floor all the time when I was about 3 or 4 years old because I was pretending to be Cinderella! Not sure she's a particularly good role model but I still like mopping now! haha

Since I bought a cordless hoover DS will clean all of downstairs with it. He thinks it's a great game

He also puts his clothes in the laundry hamper and tidies up his toys before bed time. We don't put toys away during the day unless we're expecting visitors which results in me saying 'DS, tidy up please' and him saying 'Is nanny coming?'

If I'm dusting, he wants to help do that too.

I don't care about toys as my dd literally tips her toy box out in living room and plays. Currently have a vegetable box for her to play in if I throw it away she will cry.

She is 5 and will tidy away if I ask her too. Puts her shoes and coats in the right places when we come in.
Plate in kitchen, puts stuff in the bin.

She is also aware of if she needs to wash her hands after touching slugs etc.
She will randomly get the brush and pan and sweep my kitchen floor and iv seen her get the toilet brush to scrub toilet too as there was a stain in it.

Think about how nursery classrooms stay organised and try to implement the same order at home. We have ikea drawers loosely sorted into car, trains, castle stuff, we keep food with kitchen stuff, small Lego in special boxes, duplo in its drawer. I want my kids to play with their toys and they do because they can find all the right bits quickly to get really involved in whatever game or track or city or whatever they are creating. If the toys aren't in order they won't be able to see what they have. I like things organised so I try to make a place for things I want to find easily, so we have a lot of ugly plastic tubs and baskets but it helps with keeping stuff off the floor. Tub for shoes in bedroom, basket for dressing up.

I ALWAYS have a charity shop bag on the go, and will regularly go through a basket quickly before bed and say do you want this? To the kids so they are now very relaxed and willing to give things to charity or to younger family. Easy to let them choose one thing at the charity shop too if they have got rid of five or ten bits they did not want!

I am not raising tidy, organised kids, but they are helpful. Stuff I want them to do, I think only happens if I build it into an existing routine for them. As you say, they come into the house, they put away coats and shoes. They are older so also take water bottles and lunchboxes to kitchen and put away school bags.

DD(8)'s morning tasks are "bed - curtains - teeth - spellings". She can recite this and do them, but I often have to drag her out of a book more than once in the process! She also does "pick up 10 things" at bedtime - 10 as a manageable number to start with, then another 10 etc until clear. We are less successful at getting them to pick up after themselves in communal areas. Nightly toy tidying has slipped now their games last longer and we have got slack.

In the kitchen they wipe the table, lay cutlery, get drinks. They've been doing their own breakfasts from about 3-4 (get bowl, cup and cutlery out, pour cereal, pour milk from a tiny charity shop jug to start with). It's not loads of help tbh but I think it helps them think of themselves as capable.

In their bedrooms, I think the key is the organisation of their things and not having too much. A 4 year old can put away their own clothes from the wash, but only if their drawers are simply and clearly organised, not overfilled, and if I turn a blind eye to folding technique!

There are lots of great posts here, but some that seem a bit dismissive.

People who have grown up in tidy, orderly homes often forget one crucial thing about developing the habits of keeping a tidy, orderly home. Learning how to do this is no different to any other form of human learning - it requires multiple exemplar training. This means overlearning and repeated sequential performance of these simple tasks until fluency is achieved e.g. it becomes an "autopilot" activity, like cycling or reading or saying your times tables.

It's not some sort of moral or personal achievement to find it "easy" to do these things when you were brought up to do it from an early age, any more than it is to be able to read because you had the opportunity to go to school (and you do this instinctively, automatically and without thinking too). You have either learned how to do it effectively or you have not. You will find it easy if this was the norm in your household as this is how human beings learn and develop.

For someone like the OP without early training in effective housekeeping, it may be genuinely difficult to manage to do "instinctively" so saying "just set a good example" or "just clear your house out over a few weeks and it will just happen" isn't that helpful. Obviously a great many people can and do learn how to keep home well as adults, but in a spirit of understanding and compassion, I think it can be helpful to remember that it is a far more involved task for someone who did not learn how to keep home as a young child. Statistically, there just can't be the same number of opportunities to repeat and reinforce this learning. This means, for example, it may slip when someone is tired or busy or stressed more easily than it will for people who have lifelong training in keeping house.

OP I recommend reading some of the housekeeping books and looking for chore lists on Pinterest. Marie Kondo is very useful for people who have grown up in messy hoarding homes (I have found it very helpful and my kids certainly have learned much better habits than I did as a child).

Yes to Marie Kondo in order to break the hoarding cycle.

For daily chores - I use two android apps on our tablet. One is called Regularly and the other is called Daily Checker. Daily Checker has a list of all the jobs which need to be done every day (for everyone) and Regularly for all of the jobs which need doing anything from every other day to once a year. I put all of the jobs in but then I used tags to tag the ones I felt DS was capable of doing. Then I let him choose 4 jobs as a basic level, kind of you have to do this many. Then any extra 3 he does will earn him an extra prize. I do most of the rest (as mostly SAHM at the moment) and DH does a few and then we are good to go. But I find at his age letting him choose which jobs he wants to do is a good method to get him to do them willingly, and I think it helps give him an idea of how much there is to do in the house and that we all pitch in and help each other.

DS is 6 and can read - it might be worth trying a more pictorial method with a younger child.

At 3 I used to just let/encourage him to do things with me even if it made it take longer or he didn't do them very well - I think it helped foster an idea of "I can do this" and also at that age they are very curious and tend to be interested in whatever you are doing. (It's also "doing something" with them without having to play the same repetitive games for hours and provides lots of opportunity for praise too :))

What duplodon said. It takes a long time to establish habits (still a work in progress here) and initially, it doesn't take very long at all for it to slide back into looking like you did nothing at all, which is deeply discouraging.

DP and I are both messy by nature. Would do many a Big Cleanup, enjoy a clear living room/bedroom for a while and say "oh we must keep it like this", followed by a gradual slide back into clutter again.

DS being born was a spur to getting the place tidy. He is 3 now, and we've gradually pared down the crap (plenty still to go) to the level where it's possible to keep the place tidy without herculean efforts. Mostly just very small gradual changes, getting rid of stuff a bit at a time, getting somewhere to store stuff to keep and getting in the habit of putting it back in there. So it can be done, just takes a while. Helps to be able to think that when you get rid of something, you will never have to find a place to tidy it away again.

Though looking at this thread, think we could get DS to do more! He has his own little broom for the kitchen floor, likes to load/unload the washing machine and turn it on (to the point where we have to be careful he doesn't go and do it in other people's houses) and is fascinated by the hoover but could do a lot more tidying of his own stuff.

We've started to have tidy up times (like at nursery). Before lunch, tea and bedtime all toys are put away (unless they have spent ages building g a train track etc). I find it helps to keep on top of things and builds good habits.

Mine are 5 and 3. I pick a few things they have to do which are (1) take their cups and plates and put them by the sink after all meals and snacks (2) take shoes and coats off and put them away when they come in (3) put dirty clothes in washing bin when they have a bath/ dirty PJs in washing bin when they get dressed. I also do a "tidy" up before bed. Tbh, I make this quite easy as all the stuff just needs to be chucked in the plastic tubs/ Expedit unit. I don't worry about it being perfect.

If it helps, I was a lazy little shitbag as a kid and then I suddenly became really tidy as a teenager when my mum started paying me to do stuff as she went back to work FT so there is hope of a late transformation.

This too OP ... www.spaceclearing.com/blog/ I read her book CLEAR YOUR CLUTTER WITH FENG SHUI as I was a hoarder big time, it was all very tidy though, but still a hoarder all the same, mother a hoarder and still is and this book changed my life, left partner after reading it as the last chapter is all about emotional decluttering ... anyway, there is an e-book too if you don't have time to read it. Good luck! x