One of the most important things a parent can do for a child is to support a child’s sense of responsibility.   Responsible children learn to solve problems, get on with others, and feel like an important part of a community.  We can help children begin to build this important concept by setting them chores from a very young age. 

At first, most children enjoy performing chores but they often want to choose the time to perform the skill and are not bothered about doing a good job, or indeed, job completion.  When a child is at the stage where they know the sequence of behaviors involved in a particular task and have the motor skills to perform at least some of it, they are ready to be given an assigned chore.  Because young children often enjoy “helping out”, the chores should not be presented as negative.  Toddlers should be set the task of tidying toys and helping to clean the play areas.  Children 2 yrs and older can be set other chores, I have listed some ideas here:

• Make their bed
• Set the table (I personally believe that you can get nearly any motor or language target into setting the table)
• Clean their room
• Tidy the play areas before bedtime (great for working on sorting)
• Dust specific tables once a week (choose flat surfaces where you can see the results of dusting easily)
• Load and unload the dishwasher (obviously avoiding sharp utensils and the fine china.) And just a tip from experience, make some visual sign for the dishwasher to let your child know if the dishes in the dishwasher are clean or dirty.
• Load and unload the washing machine.  Again, you can get a lot of language and motor targets into this activity.  Wet, dry, dirty, light, dark, heavy, etc.
• Wipe the table after a meal
• Carry in a bag of bread from the grocery store (when Allie was little she had her own mini bag for carrying a couple grocery store items)
• Fold napkins (great fine motor activity)
• Feed the dog

To get the most benefit from assigning your child chores, properly assign the chores; do not make it seem as if they are just “helping”.  You can do this for other jobs, but your child should have some jobs that are assigned to her as her own.  This is where responsibility comes from.  If that end table in the living room is hers to dust and no one else does it (at least that she sees), she will feel more pride and sense of worth and importance than if she is helping someone else do it. 

And remember, the emphasis is not on being terribly clean and tidy; we don’t want our children feeling like the table can’t get dirty or that the playroom can never get untidy.  Instead, we want them to feel pride at completing a task and to take ownership of it.  To achieve this, praise them for being so “responsible”, “grown up”, and “independent” at “doing their jobs”, rather than for “good cleaning” and “good tidying”.   

And when they do those jobs well, you can work on being served tea and toast in bed (I’m not quite there with that one yet).

© Ann Haig Wheeler, DSC 2009

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