As part of habit training, doing chores is one of our focus this year. I read in Charlotte Mason's Home Education that our children do not belong to the parents. They belong to the society and as parents, our responsibility is to prepare them to become good, reliable, and responsible citizens of the world. I can't think of a better way to train a kid to be responsible but to give her responsibilities. This way, her mind will get used to thinking of the tasks that she needs to do before she does the things she wants. The discipline of habit right there, working its way into making a responsible adult.
As of right now, her responsibilities include fixing her bed in the morning, preparing her own breakfast, clearing the table after we eat lunch, dusting and cleaning surfaces around the house, putting away her toys and books, taking a bath by herself, and of course, her homeschool duties like setting up the table for our study time and finishing her assignments.
It may seem too much for a young kid, sometimes I feel like she's doing too much already. But she started with just one task in the beginning. Her initial responsibility was fixing her bed after she wakes up. It took a lot of time and consistent gentle reminders before she formed the habit of arranging her pillows properly before getting off the bed in the morning. Like any other habits we're trying to form, there is some bit of friction when we started. The first stumbling block was that she does not know how to fix the bed yet which was pretty much easy to deal with. I taught her how to, just like any other new things she needed to learn.
Then, of course, there's the fact that she did not want to do chores. Just like any new idea, it is expected to have some disagreements and some friction. It was a lot of work training her to do things on her own. At times I thought that I would just do it myself but the idea of her having to have me do things for her in the future sounded a lot more gruesome to me. So I needed to do the extra work of reminding her as patiently as I possibly can. I had to do the hard work as early as now so that in the future, our lives will be set for easier days.
Once she's already built that early morning habit of fixing her bed, teaching her other chores was much easier. She has been introduced to the idea of responsibilities so introducing more responsibilities to her received a better reaction. It is okay to introduce more tasks for her, but flooding a kid with too much will just cause her to shut down. So I had to add tasks to her as gradual as I can. She adapted to her new tasks a lot smoother compared to the first one. I still needed to do tons of reminding but it seemed like she got that one fixed by herself.
She asked me to put up a whiteboard for her on a wall in the kitchen. She listed down her tasks and she would check those tiny checkboxes she put before each task.
There's been a lot of improvement in her behavior when it comes to taking on a job. She even made a motto which she teaches other kids who seem to procrastinate. She said that We should do the difficult tasks first so that we will look forward to the fun stuff after we're done. She said it was so much fun to look forward to playtime and TV time than do all the fun stuff first while dreading that once playtime is done, she'll have to do chores. I for one like that kind of mindset.
“The mother who takes pains to endow her children with good habits secures for herself smooth and easy days; while she who lets their habits take care of themselves has a weary life of endless friction with the children.”
Introducing chores to children is not an easy feat. They might even feel like hating you, you might also feel like hating yourself during the process. But if done properly, with love and patience, and a lot of grace for you and the kid, doing chores will help not just you around the house, but more importantly the kid. We are preparing them to learn how to live by themselves, without ever needing us. Because like it or not, we won't always be there for them. Best train them to become independent, reliable, responsible adults than to rear them as dependent, lazy grown ups.
