Ending the Chore Wars

Our philosophy is that it's important for each member of the family to work each day for the good of the family, in other words do chores. 

Over the years I've tried a lot of different ways to get the kids to do their chores with minimal effort from me.  I tried charts where the children earned stars for jobs completed, but I was always the one who had to enforce consequences or grant rewards for chores.  The children were always putting off their chores and I was left reminding and nagging.  I hated to hand out the "you can't play with anyone until your chores are done" consequence because we've never lived near other families so invitations to play are choice opportunities. 

One of the great things about chores is we have lots of opportunities to try different systems because each day brings another chance to try something.  I ended up throwing away the charts and went to a "everyone works after dinner" (including mom and dad straightening up the kitchen).  This worked much better because after dinner was the time for everyone to work and it was immediately evident if someone was slacking off.  The only drawback was, I was trying to wash up from dinner and hand out chores to children.  It was chaotic and hard for me to keep track of who was doing what. 

I came up with our chore wheel.  We've been using it for over two years and it has significantly lessened my work for getting chores done.  We have four children old enough to do chores so we have four different quadrants on our wheel.  Each day the names rotate forward one quadrant.  I tried to make the jobs even but it didn't take long for the children to decide which days were easy and which were hard.  It takes less than 15 minutes for the children to get their chores done, even on the "hard" days.  If someone is missing, sick or celebrating a birthday, we divide up their jobs among who is left and add an additional chore if needed.

I found out I need another chore wheel for our upcoming trip.  When we went to the ocean last month, it was just the kids and me.  We were there three nights/four days.  By the end, I was frazzled.  It was tough for me to even get a shower, or a minute to myself because I was doing everything.  Cooking in a hotel room, finding missing items, wiping bottoms, supervising swimming and beach time, etc.  If I'd try to sit down for a minute, someone would see me and decide I definitely needed something to do.  I came up with a chore chart that will give me a helper with each of the little ones, help with packing each day, and someone to wash the dishes .  I'm so glad I figured out there was a need and came up with a solution before I was stuck half way across the country getting grumpy!  Of course, on hearing that we had a special vacation chore wheel, the kids were less than enthused.  I heard, "What?!  It's our vacation!"  "So, what, you get the whole three weeks off?"  One of my children actually believes that my taking six kids by myself from Washington State to Illinois and back while pulling a cargo trailer and camping in tents along the way, but asking them to pitch in would be me getting three weeks off!  Dode and I let them know that without a little bit of help from everyone, it wasn't going to be possible to take the trip.