Household Tasks: An Educational Take

As most (hopefully all!) of you, my dear readers, know, it takes a lot to run a household! Although I did not take a formal home economics class (and wish they were universal again for others' sake), my home education, based on a Charlotte Mason (CM) approach, included a healthy dose of household tasks. I want to reflect this week on the intersection of "chores" and "education."

Charlotte Mason's Orientation Toward Chores

Charlotte believed that all of life could contribute to one's education. I'm not sure how she would have named "chores" per se--the term for me (having received a CM-style education) connotes a chore chart, with stickers given for complete performance of a day's chores, followed by a token reward after a certain number of stickers.

How, then, would she have conceptualized children completing the necessary tasks for maintaining a household alongside or independently of their parents?

Habit Training and Motivation

A CM-consistent philosophy capitalizes on training children from young on in good habits, especially of attention, obedience, and industry. In a typical "term" (academic trimester), parents following a CM approach will focus on two habits, one at a time. Household tasks--doing what needs to be done, when it needs to be done--certainly fit into the category of "habit."

Motivation is one key to solid habit formation, along with repetition. However, as I mentioned last week, the motivation must be intrinsic, not extrinsic. Parents need to know when to support and when to back off, so that their children can develop and maintain their motivation that doesn't depend on external rewards. They naturally want to please their parents and other authority figures, so this can be a tricky balance!

"The Art of Living"

This phrase, quoted in the Simply Charlotte Mason post on which this section is based, incorporates thet concept that we don't live primarily as individuals, but in community and relationship with each other. The nuclear/extended family is the most basic unit of this community. We contribute to the community to which we belong. 

Secondary reasons to train children in doing chores as part of their lifestyle include their need for age-appropriate responsibility ("they help make the mess; they can help clean it up"), the benefits for adulthood (not needing as much conscious attention toward each daily task), and a service-oriented mindset.

For me, and others, a clean, tidy, and well-maintained house is more pleasant to live in. If piles aren't visible and items are put away, part of my brain can relax and enjoy or focus on other activities, whether for work or leisure.

Training in Tasks One Knows

Basic steps for training a child in a new household tasks are:

1. Choose a developmentally-appropriate, reasonably safe task given the child's abilities
2. Have Child nearby to observe you as you complete a step of or the entire task
3. As often as necessary, do the task along with Child. Child may need to do just one step of a task (e.g., folding a washcloth while you are folding the rest of the laundry).
4. Watch Child complete the task on his/her own, providing less and less feedback as performance improves.

Let's explore each of these steps. Step one involves the parent(s) being aware not only of their child's age but also of their development. The term for this in the therapy world is "typically developing" or "atypically developing." Children's abilities and other characteristics, considering all children of a given age, are distributed for the most part in a bell-shaped curve. "Typically developing" children hang out in the middle 68% or so of the bell, sometimes the middle 95%. So, within that portion of the bell, there is a tremendous amount of not-abnormal variation.

The post I linked to basic steps has some good starter ideas for age-appropriate chores. Interpreting this information along with the bell curve, as a parent you would evaluate whether your child is performing at a "typical" 2-year-old's (or other age) capacity, and select tasks from there.

Step 2 is pretty easy when the task is within the next-level-challenge window of when a child gets naturally curious about it. I can distinctly remember, when Child was 12-18 months old, the emerging interest in removing and replacing items, so we capitalized on that by emptying the dishwasher and putting items into the trash can.

Step 3 often takes the most time (potentially weeks) and can require some of your parental creativity for simplification. Can your child do the entire laundry load from start to finish? Maybe not, but they can learn to sort by color and fabric type, or simply fold smaller items like washcloths.

Step 4 is almost as hard as step 3 for some parents. I use my physical therapy knowledge of motor learning, specifically faded feedback, to help my rational brain when the emotional brain wants to hover and give more feedback for perfection rather than independence. Although Child will likely still perform the task requiring increased time, attention, and effort, s/he will be doing it independently, which is the goal.

Even in winter, there are plenty of season-specific and more general household tasks that children can learn and practice. For Child, in this season, I'm thinking of a few to work on over the next few months:

• Folding laundry
• Loading and unloading the washing machine and dryer
• Wiping up spills
• Putting own toys in a box

Training in Tasks One Won't Know

One of the reasons I got back into blogging regularly was the positive example of some families who happen to be a lot more handy than either I or Husband are, and who are in a very different life situation of working at home for themselves rather than working at a more traditional job. How can children in such families learn life skills that their parents will never learn, for whatever reason?

The same principles apply here, but with other people as the teachers. To remain true to Charlotte's principles, I would recommend that people be in-person or through books if possible, using videos or internet sources as last resorts.

In homeschool or other settings, this can translate to visiting the library, formally job shadowing, or watching and questioning workers when they come to one's house. Sometimes opportunities are seasonal, but for us mostly they have been fortuitous.

To share one example from this past year, we had a consultation for basement egress window installation. Neither of us does woodwork, nor plans to learn, in the immediate future, so we called a trained expert to consult. Child was in my arms listening and watching as the workman took measurements inside and outside, talked through possible locations for a window, calculated the possible size for the window, and discussed materials from which various components could be made.

If Child had been a bit older at the time, both of us could have asked questions and collectively understood more of what was going on. By the time the installation occurs, this may be the case, and become a golden opportunity for introducing to carpentry and excavation skills.

What are your favorite strategies for training your children (or yourself) in household tasks?