By the age of ten there are few cleaning jobs girls or boys can’t do as well or better than you.

 

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You can make cleaning into a game or adventure for the youngest children. Give them a dust cloth or lambswool duster and let them race you in the job of dusting to a finish point. Young children love to vacuum with a small hand held vacuum — let them go after the spilled potting soil or the crumbs under the kitchen table. They will also enjoy taking a wagon or toy shopping cart and going from room to room to pick up litter and left-behind things.

Try to stick with sessions of no more than ten or fifteen minutes so you hold their interest, and keep the “games” fresh so they don’t get bored.

When you clean with children, be sure to allow extra time for training and accept the fact that they aren’t going to do things exactly as you would. Yes, you could do a better job in half the time, but you want and need to teach them how. Don’t just do the job for them out of frustration. Your persistence will pay off as cleaning becomes a habit for your kids.

Have Patience

Help your children learn the right way to do things, the techniques and fine points, so that the job won’t have to be done over because it didn’t come out as expected. That cuts out tons of negativity: “This isn’t clean!” the parent said to a kid who thought she had done her best, undoing all the preceding encouragement.

Again, the magic word is: “Here, let me show you!”

“Cleaning class” may be discouraging at times, but don’t give up. For a while, maybe even months or years, your children’s cleaning help may have to be redone or may be of little actual help to you. But your child is learning. As children get older they can help a lot more and even do major jobs themselves. One way to speed this is to teach your older children one skill at a time and let them perfect it. Window cleaning, for example — teach it carefully to one of your children. From then on that is his or her job. He or she will become very good at it and will actually help you now.

As that child perfects the job of windows, move him to another chore such as bathroom cleaning. After a while he will become good at that and so on. After a few years a child will be good at a number of jobs and the rest will fall into place.

 

Excerpted from Don Aslett's book, No Time to Clean: How to Reduce & Prevent Cleaning the Professional Way.