Ever recruited a kid to help with a chore…only to find the scene messier than before they started “helping”?

Or decided that it’s easier to complete the job yourself rather than listen to endless complaining?

Take heart! There are hidden benefits to including your kids in chores—even when the dishes are inexplicably dirtier than before your son “washed” them.

Kids whose parents require them to complete household chores grow to be better at handling frustration, adversity, and delayed gratification. (From the American Academy of Child and Adolescent Psychiatry.)

Here are eight practical tips for motivating kids to complete chores:

Call them “responsibilities” instead of chores.

If my kids complain about jobs around the house, I remind them that a household in which eight people contribute to the mess is a household where eight people need to help clean it up. We are responsible together for keeping the household running. These are family expectations, not burdens.

A united front is key.

If you make any major changes to the current household responsibilities situation, (like implementing a new job chart,) talk to the kids about it with your husband. If you are both on the same page, the kids will know that the jobs are not negotiable, they are expected. 

Even if it’s easier for you to complete an unfinished job you assigned to a child, require them to finish it.

You’ve passed the same pile of books on the steps after asking your son to put them back on his shelf. It would take 15 seconds to do it yourself. Resist the urge! If you assigned your child the job, they need to own it. We are teaching our kids so much more than putting away toys and books. We’re teaching them to be accountable and that their choices have consequences. Lost screen time? An additional chore? An unfinished job is an opportunity to teach a valuable life lesson about natural consequences.

Set timers.

When our boys clean their shared room, we set a timer for thirty minutes. If they can finish the job in the set window, they might earn an additional perk, like extended bedtime by fifteen minutes.

Use music!

Our five-year-old daughters can occasionally act incapable or exhausted when it’s time to clean their room. But turn on the clean up song and watch them work with vigor! It’s like flipping a switch. Our boys clean like Molly Maids if we play the Super Mario Brothers theme music. Try out different tunes and see what works best for your people.

Move your plates and cups to the lower cupboards, so that small hands can empty the dishwasher.

When my kids were four years old, they could put away silverware. As they turned five, they could carefully put the ceramic plates away. The smallest kiddos are usually ecstatic to be considered big enough to contribute to the family.

Celebrate job completion and good attitudes.

Take a minute after the work is done to look your child in the eye and tell them what a fantastic job they did. Ask them how it feels to have started and finished something so productively. Tell them to remember this good feeling next time they need to start a chore.

Give the older kids a chance to be job foreman.

Sometimes I will write out a list and put my oldest two in charge of delegating. I finish my own jobs around the house while the two oldest rise to the occasion. They love checking off tasks and feel trusted and important, which they are!

These ideas and tips have worked wonders in our home. If you are facing bad attitudes or kids who aren’t readily onboard—congratulations, you have normal, human children! This is an opportunity for you to help your kids grow in character and endurance. Your investment in their lives and work ethic up front will repay dividends. For you, for their jobs, future households and effectiveness in kingdom work.

You’ve got this, mama!

PS My kids’ attitudes towards chores improved dramatically during and after our Digital Detox. If you want to know how we did it, and how you can too, you can read the guide I wrote. Digital Detox: The Two-Week Tech Reset for Kids releases 4/19/22. But if you preorder, you can read it electronically right now.