Level 5 chores: practical tips and tricks

Your children are now almost teenagers, and they may grumble more about doing their chores, preferring to spend more time having fun with their friends! So here are a few tips to motivate them to cooperate:

• If you use the General Store to reward them for their efforts, from now on think about including more privileges they don't usually get easily: inviting a friend for a sleepover or a special activity, permission to stay up later, extra video game time, etc. We bet that will be enough to motivate them to fully cooperate with household chores!
• Don't hesitate to apply natural consequences to their choices. They forget to do their laundry every week? They won't have any clean clothes to put on their backs! They don't cooperate when it's time to do their chores during the week? Drop the special activities planned for the weekend, explaining that they need to use that free time to take care of the house instead.
• Your child is big now but keeps forgetting to do their laundry? To help them remember, hang this poster on their bedroom door handle on laundry days!

The older children get, the more complex chores become, and so they need to be taught. To let your kids know how to do the laundry or clean the bathroom or kitchen, give them this handy cheat sheet of each of the necessary steps:

Cheat sheet for more complex chores

With new chores come new responsibilities, but also new freedoms, which will let your kids see how enjoyable it is to grow up too! To help you decide which freedoms to grant your child based on their age, check out this printable:

Responsibilities/freedoms

Looking for more tips to encourage your little ones' independence? We've created a complete Independence Path for you, available exclusively to our Family Managers! There you can discover all the actions your child is able to do on their own, depending on their age and developmental level, across every area of daily life, plus a host of practical tools to help them. You'll discover that at the age of ten or eleven, a child is now able to:

Eating

• Peel a hard-boiled egg on their own

Dressing

• Help choose their clothes according to their own style

Personal hygiene

• Clean and trim their own nails

Household participation

• Sort and put away their own school supplies at the end of the year
• Tidy their room on their own, proactively, once a week

Time awareness

• Grasp impersonal time

Environmental education

• Ask themselves whether they really need something before buying it

Financial education

• Manage simple expenses
• Know what credit and financing are for

Social bearings

• Get to school on their own on foot or by bike
  
  

Want to learn more? Get access to our entire Independence Path by signing up for our monthly Family Manager subscription!