Tristan – Chore Pacs – again

First let me say I chuckled over the trash down beside the can – I have one child who will empty food scraps into the trash can and ALWAYS get some on the floor and leave it. I swear she just doesn’t even look at the trash can when she’s scraping! Thankfully she usually eats everything on her plate.

Consequences that work probably will need to be a bit individualized for each child. Here are some ideas for the specific situations you mentioned:

1. Putting dishes into dishwasher inappropriately – Give the child dish duty for an entire day. Nobody has to load, unload, etc but that child. If your children usually do their own dishes from the table (like mine do) then make a big deal about Echo having to wait at the table while everyone is eating/drinking to take their dishes in for them. After a day of that most likely Echo will be happy to do it ‘right’. If not, rinse and repeat.

2. Tidy room – my kids have a hard time with this when there is too much that they can get out. If one child is having trouble remove most of that child’s stuff to a box, if it is several or all children then do the same for everyone. They lose out on having more toys, books, clothes available because they’re not taking care of what they have. I’ve found my boys need less available or they really struggle with getting their room picked up.

3. Garbage on the floor by the can – first, train everyone for a few days (just a few minutes each morning) on how to check that everything makes it in the trash can & picking up anything that falls out. Then begin to enforce the consequence – at our house it is to pick up everything by the can and go get a wash rag to scrub the trash can and surrounding floor on hands and knees until the timer beeps (2-5 minutes depending on age). Some weeks I have a really clean trash can…LOL.

4. Dishes on the counter that you don’t know whose they are – yeah, not fun! We do a few things. First, the kids all have waterbottles instead of cups so we can tell whose is whose. (We did it to cut down on sharing germs, but it’s helpful for this too). If you’re using cups can you get a cheap plastic set from Walmart and put each person’s name or initial on one? We have grabbed a few of the $1 holiday sets as needed. Then there is no mistaking cups at least. For plates/bowls I just really try to stay on top of them. At first I had to hang out at the table/by the kitchen to eyeball them and immediately provide a consequence. Now I know who my ‘repeat offender’ tends to be. 😉

Overall we’ve had to choose consequences that:

1. Mean something to the child.

2. Are easy to enforce so I’ll be consistent.

And I know what you mean, school can’t be dropped every three months when we need to work on habits again. I try to have chore ‘brush up/training’ sessions when I notice something consistently not getting done. These are just 5 minutes for several days in a row NOT during chore time. Also use natural breaks like time off around holidays, spring break or summer break (even if you’re just off for a week) to do ‘chore boot camp’. You’re already off school, so there is time to focus on doing chores up to mom’s standard for a few days.

Our kids all have a colored cup! This is awesome and we’ve used it for years. it also saves on dishes caue if you don’t know where your cup is you don’t drink. One cup a day!

I am loving reading through this. Very helpful and making me think.

My issue with sending to be early is .. they just wake that much earlier if they actually fall asleep (and we are already up at 630/7am)? And even if they don’t we have one older with one younger in a room so I can’t have the older in there bothering the younger who is trying to go to sleep? HMM I will think this one through more. Thanks for this post very helpful.

Tristan’s comments about having too much stuff to take out and use/play with making it harder to keep things tidy hit home with me. I was just thinking about this the other day when I began to realize just how much “stuff” we had accumulated over the past few years (myself included).

When we moved into my dad’s house, I could only take certain things (most of that season’s clothing, our school items, the major personal items, and a limited number of toys for the kids) because we were moving out….shall I say, “in haste,” and I didn’t want to alert my husband and stepsons that we were leaving until the day we actually left. We left with only about a day and a half to prepare. So, we didn’t have a whole lot to deal with at the time.

A few months later, my husband decided to move to an apartment, and we were on slightly better terms, so I was allowed to pretty freely go through everything else in the house and pack up extra clothing, the rest of the toys, and other personal items. At the time (this was 5 years ago), I went through as much as I could, throwing out some things and freecycling or giving away a lot more. I didn’t keep very many kitchen items and almost no furniture since we have been using my mom’s old kitchen stuff (fun, because I remember these things from my childhood) and the furniture my dad already has. Still, we managed to fill the closets in our bedrooms and two large boxes went into storage at a friend’s house.

So….I was looking around in dismay a couple of days ago at all of the extra items taking up floor space in my bedroom, the overflowing stuff in my girls’ room, and the junk under my son’s bed. (He’s just messy and doesn’t throw things away.) We’ve just got to get a handle on this stuff and declutter the bedrooms, the kitchen, and the living room. I’m not sure whether to make decluttering an assigned daily chore (like maybe 10 minutes each day per person) or break it down into an ongoing project.

Part of the problem is that, while the girls agree that something needs to be done, they run out of steam very quickly and are overwhelmed by the mess in their room. And, my son doesn’t see why we need to clean up anything at all, even though we’ve talked about how nice it is to not have things missing or broken. He doesn’t even like to leave a throw on the chair with the ripped cushion–he doesn’t like to have the nasty-looking part covered up and constantly takes the cover off of it!

I’m going to take some time today to get my thoughts in order about this and start cleaning up myself. Then I think we need to try a family meeting again. I had forgotten that I planned to take the day off (not because the public schools are off, but because it’s my son’s half-birthday….we usually take our birthdays off, but his is in the summer….so, half-birthday holiday!)

*Sigh*   What’s a Messie Mom to do?