Motivating Kids To Do Their Chores

Most believe that good work habits are an essential part of anyone’s success. And, most parents believe that good work habits are first learned at home. Therefore, work at home, in most families, is divided up among parents and children. From this point part of parents’ work is to get kids to do their work. It can be a real hassle. So, I offer the following suggestions.

Begin early. Start when children are young and invite them to perform a small task. If their language skills, at around three years, are good enough you can teach them to make their bed. This is done by following six steps: (1) show them, (2) practice with them, (3) invite them to do it by themselves, (4) while they are working leave for a few seconds and then return, (5) catch them working, (6) praise, hug, and smile when they are working and when the task is completed.

Add other tasks, show a positive example, teach cooperation, and label them as a “good helper, or good worker.” If you want to build “work,” into a child’s identity it is important for you to show a positive example yourself, give them tasks, and then build the ideas of working and achieving into their identities. Some children are more organized than others and will take to this more easily. Others will require more effort. When you show a positive example of work yourself, while getting them to do their chores, and then use positive labels to describe your children they will use the labels later to describe themselves. They are internalizing the meaning of the word as applied to them. When all of this is connected to the fact that work can be cooperative, which means that more than one person is required to complete the task, children learn their own work is essential for everyone’s success.

Increase their capacity for work. Everyone has some idea of how much can be accomplished in a certain period of time with a certain effort. Some learn that a lot can be accomplished and others learn a more measured approach. If you want your children to have a great capacity for work you can do the following. First, before they start their work (school homework is a good tool to teach this) ask them to estimate how long it will take to complete their work. Then, as they begin help them “self monitor” by organizing to be effective and then staying on the task until it is completed. For instance, many achievers talk to themselves while they are performing.

Teach standards of excellence. For everyone’s emotional health it is important to give allowance for children to get better and better at something rather than demanding perfection all at once. You can do this by asking children to evaluate their own work, pointing out good things, and then asking them to identify what they could do better. Then, with a little follow up they can see if it is possible to improve on their previous performance. Self evaluation by the children accompanied by guided participation from parents leads to better work and more emotional health. A lot of criticism and pressure from parents can motivate children to work but they work with fairly high levels of anxiety.

What about incentives and rewards? Many parents use positive reinforcement or token systems where children get a reward for doing their work. Positive reinforcement works and many parents swear by it but there is one caveat we should note. With some children if you use rewards they will not find the intrinsic pleasure or satisfaction that motivates them to persist to achieve at high levels. So if you use a reward system of some kind, watch to see if children stop working when there is no reward. If this is the case you may want to combine conversation, warmth, and asking kids to identify their feelings of successful achievement at the same time you provide the reward. Then, thin out your rewards to see if your children will continue working. If they do you have taken an external reward and helped them find internal fulfillment.

Does the nature of the work matter? Yes, it does but children need to learn to work at things they don’t like so much as well as participate in just those things they like a lot. To help motivate them use the “Premack Principle,” (after David Premack) which means that you put low probability tasks in front of high probably tasks. That is, they can watch TV after they get their homework done.

Going through the effort to teach good work habits is worth it. Children are productive, their sense of power and adequacy is raised, and they will receive more satisfaction with themselves. Plus, they will grow up and move out instead of staying with you so you can provide for them.