469-795-9050With kids at home, cleaning seems to be an uphill task that consumes a lot of time and effort. Most of you might have noticed that children often put their toys everywhere around the house or might run through the house with a glass full of fruit juice or milk. To avoid such things around your house, children need to be taught these behaviors and habits as they grow and develop. Mind of children are like sponge, in short when they’re old enough they can quickly pick up such small tasks and start helping around the house.
Here are some tips using which you can put your children to some cleaning tasks.
Prepare a Cleaning Checklist: Instructing children to clean their own bedroom or pick up the living room can overwhelm them. Instead, make a checklist of tiny tasks for them to follow. You can instruct them to keep their toys in a box, put storybook back to shelf or put building blocks in container. If you have tiny tots who don’t go to school, you can assign them any of these chores at a time. When their work is finished, don’t forget to praise their efforts and assign them next task.
Smart Tip: to help tiny tots how to figure out which toys belong to which container or shelves, it is advisable to label the container and shelves with the pictorial image of toys/items they hold.
Instilling a Habit of Picking Up: Make you kids learn the habit of picking things up a soon they’re finished using them. Once they dwell into this habit, things will become easier for you as later on you’ll not need to even ask them to do small tasks such as making their beds, putting stuffed toys back to shelves before their dinner time. Just by doing a little monitoring for initial few days, gradually this habit will become an integral part of their daily routine.
Making Cleaning an Exciting Activity: Cleaning is a tedious job especially for kids. There’s no surprise that daily cleaning activity will not bore them. Engaging your children by creating some clean-up games that involve them and their friends too. Let you and your child enact some role play game. Playing some song or music and challenge the kids to wrap their cleaning task before the last note. There are some simple ways to keep kids engaged and adding some excitement to cleaning.
Rewards: To encourage the kids and their cleaning habits it is necessary to adopt a positive reinforcement strategy. Besides recognition of efforts, there are some other ways in which you can reward your kids such as:
- Allow them 15 minutes of screen time for each they accomplish be it making their bed, taking dog out for a walk, loading the dishwasher etc.
- Place a task chart on wall and assign them score for every completed task and based on score they got you can gift them their favorite toy or any other stuff.
Encouragement and patience are your best armors to get your kids to clean their rooms. Praising them in person and in front of guests/ family friends will make them develop some confidence.
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