5 Tips On Keeping Your House Clean With Kids
5 Tips on keeping your house clean with kids
Most parents sit down after a long day and remember how easy it was keeping your house clean before you had those precious little pains in the backside. However much you love your kids, cleaning up after them really is a chore in itself!
There are a few quick little tips that you can teach your kids to do that will really cut down the workload of picking up all of their toys yourself. Now I’ve got your attention! Here goes:
Make a daily chore checklist
This is one for you all to take away and implement straight away. You may not think so, but children like structure just as much as us adults do and implementing a daily chore checklist can really help.
Implementing a daily store checklist needs to have quick and easy jobs at the start and then more jobs can be added once your child gets older and used to the current chores.
For example:
Chores for young kids:
- Put toys back in the toybox
- Place dirty clothes in the washing basket
- Get shoes on the shoe rack
Chores for older kids:
- Make bed
- Set the table for dinner
- Get lunchbox and homework out of school bag
These small chores will make your lives that little bit easier and give you more time for a snuggle with your little one, and of course, that bit of time to yourself when the kids have been put to bed.
Reward your kids
One of the best ways for your children to get used the idea of doing their daily chores is to implement some kind of reward scheme.
For example:
Rewards for young kids:
- A sticker chart with stars or smiley faces
- Make them promises to take them to the park (always keep those promises)
Rewards for older kids:
- Give them 15 minutes of time on their technology
- Play with them in the garden for half an hour
The best reward for the older kids in the world we live in today is to change the password for the Wi-Fi every day, once their chores have been completed, give them the password to have a small amount of time on the internet.
Make cleaning fun
Yes, cleaning can be fun! Here are a quick few ways of making cleaning fun for your children:
For the younger children:
- Put on a song like the Tidy Up Rhumba which your kids really will love and dance along to while cleaning!
- If you have more than one child, let them compete to see who can tidy up first!
- Let them organise their toys by colour or type
For the older children:
- Put on their favourite songs, like a Little Mix track or something along those lines. (The Tidy Up Rhumba does work on older kids sometimes as well)!
- Let the older ones compete as well, it may be a bit more competitive, but it will eventually get done!
Don’t let chores be a punishment
If you tell your child to do a chore as a punishment, this will turn a chore into a negative and not a positive. Instead of making them do a chore, put them on the naughty step and then encourage them to do their chores after you have let them play for a bit and take their mind off being naughty.
Make it a habit
Make sure your children get used to doing your selected chores every single day to ensure they stick in their minds. They will eventually do this on their own, without you having to tell them and also not expect a reward every time as well.
After all of this you don’t have time to keep the other parts of your house clean, then give your local Merry Maids a call. Find your local Merry Maids here.
If you have a quick 2 minutes – One of our franchises, Kingston Merry Maids has just celebrated receiving an award for their staff, read the full story here.