We know many of our clients struggle with executive function. What’s one powerful way families can teach executive function to their children? Chores! In episode 55, Nate and Melanie Young describe their chore system. Their system teaches skills for executive function and self regulation in a realistic setting, and it just works.
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Music: Simple Gifts performed by Ted Yoder, used with permission
Denise: If you tuned into the last episode of The Speech Umbrella, you heard all about Dr. Korb’s reasons for raising an organized child. Although we wrote about the importance of chores, I didn’t spend a lot of time reviewing that part of the book because I knew our guests today would more than cover everything you could possibly want to know about chores and household organization.
I’m joined today by Nate and Melanie young, the creators of a system called The Chore Chart. So I’m just going to have Nate and Melanie introduce themselves, talk about their family a little bit before we dive into The Chore Chart.
Melanie: Hi, I’m Melanie. We have five kids. Our oldest is 14 and our youngest is seven. We have three girls and two boys, and they have learned a lot through our system and know how to do some chores.
Nathan: One of the biggest things we wanted to achieve, at least as parents, while these kids are growing up is we wanted to be able to prepare them for real life. Which means that there’s a hard connection between work and money and that as hard as people want to try and shelter their kids from the quote unquote Real World and not make them start thinking about money and budgets and having to work and just enjoy childhood.
I think it’s a huge disservice to kids if they don’t have that kind of upbringing or that opportunity to learn how to work and appreciate the work. And so, that’s something that we’ve put a lot of attention toward.
I have a background in project management and I’ve done some software engineering. I’ve done some systems engineering with phone systems and technical support, but everything I’ve done and everything I enjoy doing is really centered around a high attention to detail and being organized.
Denise: I want to know, and I think our listeners want to know what was the beginning? What problem were you trying to solve when you started The Chore Chart? Because you didn’t always do it?
Melanie:
Melanie: Our first chore chart was, just a spreadsheet with like eight things for the kids to do. If they got it done, then it was marked off. When Nate got home from work, if their chores were done, they got a daddy sticker and it was a sticker of his face and they loved that.
That was their goal. And then at the end of the week, we would put a penny on each chore they got done, and that was what they got. But they didn’t love that they were doing the same chore for like six months or however long we were like, okay, this is your chore. And then they’d say, how long do I have to do this chore?
And it had only been like two days and they were done, they wanted something else. So then we moved to a different system and change things a little bit more frequently, but they were still grumpy about all the chores and having to do it for so long. And then Nate brought home a system from his work and that’s where it started.
Nathan: We fell into the same trap in the beginning that I think most parents fall into or most people when they’re trying to organize a chore system. They create a spreadsheet and you have your who’s assigned the chore across the top, or maybe it’s the days of the week. And then you’ve got all the chores that need to be done.
And it just, it becomes very overwhelming. There’s not any great way to do it as anybody can tell you. And the very specific problems that I was trying to solve with a chore system, especially in the beginning was everybody wants it to be fair, both Melanie and I wanted the system, whatever it was to be fair.
However, that’s a very hard ground to find in common, right? What’s fair to a stay at home spouse, maybe 50/50. What’s fair to a spouse that’s going to work and studying at the university and having to do homework, 50/50 does not sound fair. Because she wants me to see how much work she puts into doing housework and stuff during the day, so that we have an appreciation for other, and so that’s what I was trying to achieve, but I failed miserably the first several years that we were doing this.
Melanie: Yeah. When we had three little kids at home and he was gone to work all day, I’d get a room clean and take a picture and send it to him because I knew by the time he got home, that room, wasn’t going to be cleaned anymore. Because three little kids running around, they leave a mess everywhere they go and they don’t know how to clean those up as little kids. And so it was, it was trying and was hard. Um, but once we really started with this system, it actually, I didn’t like the system, but we’ll be honest at first I did not like it. And it took me a while to get used to it. But now it’s. A life-changer, it makes things so much easier.
Denise: So let’s talk about this system. Let’s go over the basics first. Then we’ll go over how someone could start it. We’ll talk about some problem solving and the benefits you’ve seen. So starting with the basics, describe the basic process to me. I mean, you’ve got daily, you’ve got weekly, you’ve got monthly chores.
How does that work?
Nathan: The system we use for those that are in the software engineering field will likely be familiar with Kanban boards. But the idea is you have a card that represents a basic unit of work and you have several cards that represent all the work that needs to be done.
And you only focus on a few of them at a time. As you move them across various columns. Here are the jobs that I have in progress. And then after you complete a task, you move it across to the next column, which is this, this project is now ready for approval. It needs someone else to take a look at it , and then you move it to done.
I mean, that’s an oversimplification of the overall process and how it’s applied in the professional world, but in our home, those three columns were sufficient for us. And the idea break all the work down into very basic tasks that anybody can do, even the youngest of our children. And while that produced hundreds of cards that we go through in a month, in a week, in a day, all of the work is accounted for. So the idea of monthly chores, weekly chores and daily chores. In our house, the daily chores that need to be done on a daily basis to keep those areas clean, we have about 30 of them. And we reset those every day. The weekly chores, those are chores that only need to be done about once a week. And we have about 70 of those. And as soon as those are done, they are not repeated for that week, until we reset them in the next week. We break our monthly chores down into a four week month so that there isn’t any confusion or rush or urgency in months to have a different number of days.
It doesn’t really matter how it lines up with the calendar month, because we are in control of our system and it keeps us on track very easily.
Denise: And I just want to add that this is a physical system with movable cards, which is great for kids. They see it, they touch it, they physically move the card. And I think that’s better than some kind of software or computer thing.
Melanie: With the cards, think like monopoly cards, like for your properties, that’s kind of what they look like. We move them around each day, each morning, they start out with three cards already on their board and they’re work in progress, but those are blockers and their responsibilities that they have to do before they can do their commission-based chores. And that’s like making their bed and getting dressed and picking up their room so that their room is clean. They can find the things they need and it’s not, “Mom, do you know where my socks are?” “Mom, do you know where this is?” And they know where it is. They have a place for it.
Denise: Explain to us the difference between a blocker and a commission chore, because I think that is a really clever way to teach your children responsibility and also. Incentive to work.
Nathan: I think the easiest way to explain it a blocker is an obstacle that keeps you from moving forward with any of the other tasks. These are tasks or responsibilities that each of us have in the house, not just the kids, but for mom and dad as well. For example, make your bed. And like Melanie was saying, clean your room, get dressed, fold your laundry, if laundry was done that day. These are things that you’re expected to do and things that everybody needs to do, whether they’re getting paid for it or not. We wanted the kids to be able to discern differences between responsibilities that they must do because it’s a discipline in your life that you need to implement and work, tasks that will pay a commission that don’t have to be done, as a responsibility.
Melanie: Our daily chores are simple. They take less than 10 minutes, most of them. Or five minutes even. Our daily chores are mostly around meal times, like wiping off the table, wiping off the chairs before and after meals, helping with meals.
Nathan: Wiping off the placemats, feeding the cat. Making sure that the entertainment center is cleaned off, wiping off the piano, dusting off this thing, dusting off that thing.
These are just things that we are doing every day. To prevent things from becoming dirty and to clean them after meals, sweeping the floor in the dining room, in the kitchen every night. Uh, those are examples of our daily chores.
Denise: That’s why you can get through 70 of them in a day because they’re so simple.
Melanie: So dailies are, there’s actually only 30. So we only have 30 for daily. And then are the 70 for the monthly are a little bit more in depth, like sweeping and mopping floors, like in our bathrooms. We were doing that daily when we first started because we needed to get things done, but now we’re like, it doesn’t need to be done that often. That’s so often and so much work going into something that doesn’t need to be done that often. Since our kids aren’t as little anymore, vacuuming can be done once a week. It doesn’t need to be done every day. Monthly is more like more dusting, like, so you’re wiping off the baseboards in the room or wiping off doorframes and wiping the door down.
Nathan: So there’s a huge jump that we have between the weekly chores and monthly chores. Monthly chores are everything in the world that you could possibly need to do in your house, wiping off the crown molding around your ceilings, wiping off the baseboards in that weird closet nobody goes into. Dusting off the light fixtures and the chandelier’s and, and every little thing that could be done or needs to be done. Sweeping the garage. Right? And so these could be very dirty and monumental tasks and take a lot of time. But as time goes by, and the more often we do these chores, the less time it takes us to do those larger chores. So we can get through them very easily and things are not growing into large insurmountable tasks.
Denise: This is one of the benefits that when you clean regularly, nothing gets out of control.
Nathan: I’ve heard it said somewhere and I’m not a mathematician. I’m not a statistician and I don’t understand a lot of that, but I have heard that if you can reduce the work down and represent it with a number, you’re on the right track. And when you can track the work that’s being done, then there’s a real window and opportunity to improve on it. So for us, that numerical representation of the work to be done is how many daily chores does every person need to do? How many weekly chores, how many monthly chores?
So the way that that’s represented in the morning, we write it on a little whiteboard for the day. Everybody’s to do two green, two blue, two purple. Green are our daily. Blue are our weekly. The purple are our monthly chores. So it’s really simple for the kids to understand. All of us know what that means. We can choose which two green chores, which two blue chores. And so everybody has autonomy. They get to choose what work they’re going to do. As long as they get those two blue, two green, two purple done. And all the chores for the day are basically done before we even have breakfast or before the kids go to school.
When we send the kids to bed in the evening, the house has done. We don’t have to worry about staying up and cleaning house or cleaning up messes because it’s already done. And Melanie and I, we can spend time with ourselves. We can watch a show. We can go on a date. We can do whatever we want and the house is clean. It’s done. She doesn’t have to worry about this endless list of chores that need to be done. She doesn’t have to feel like there’s no light at the end of the tunnel. It’s just an infinite mess that we’ll never get all the way cleaned up.
Denise: Yes. And Melanie’s got a huge smile here.
Melanie: Yeah, it makes it a lot easier. They get up in the morning, they know they’ve got to do their blockers and get those done. And then while they’re working on their chores, I’m getting breakfast ready and I’ve told them if you’ll do your chores in the morning, I’ll prepare your breakfast. So you can have breakfast. You don’t have to get your breakfast and get your chores done. But most of their chores are done really quickly. And it doesn’t take a lot of time as long as they are focused because kids, I mean,
Denise: They can lose focus.
Melanie: They lose focus very easily. A lot of times they’ll chant, “Hocus Pocus, you’ve lost your focus.” And we just got to get them refocused and get them ready and get them going on their chores.
But once the chores are done, so once they’re done for the week, they’re done. Tomorrow is Saturday we have four purple chores, so four monthly chores left. One weekly chore and daily chores. So it’s going to be a very laid back, easy Saturday for chores and the kids are excited and they know. They can see it on the board. Like, cool. There’s not a lot of chores tomorrow. So we get our dailies done.
Nathan: And we can play games. We can do whatever…
Melanie: We can do whatever we want.
Nathan: And going back to the house, never actually getting very messy. It’s very rewarding on holidays or when we’re taking vacation or whatever, we know, we don’t have to worry about the house.
We can relax for a week or two or three, because we’ve been doing the work all year long and the monthly chores, they, we do them so often that doing them once a month is, is not even necessary for these chores anymore because they’re done so frequently, but we do them any.
Denise: Because you would lose your momentum. You would lose the benefit if you let it slide.
Melanie: We did talk about that we do two green and two blue and two purple. And that’s the minimum that we ask, but that doesn’t stop them from doing more. We encourage them to do as much as they want to do, because that just means they have more money. And a lot of times, sometimes our boys will get up and they’ll be like, I’m going to do five purple today.
Go for it. I’m not going to discourage you from doing more than what I am asking. And a lot of times that’s what they want to do. They want to do a little bit extra. Sometimes we can get behind in our weekly or monthly chores. And if we get behind, I’ll just ask them to do a couple extra. So with five kids, if they’ll do one more extra chore, whether it’s a blue or purple, that gives us a little bit more to get ahead or to get caught up.
We have areas that don’t have a chore card, like cleaning up the living room. Everybody leaves stuff in the living room. So that’s a room that we all work together and clean up every night.
Nathan: Those are common areas where the kids are spending a lot of the time they’re playing and they’re doing things.
So we, we did not want them getting in the habit of just ditching all the stuff that they brought out, because one poor sucker has the card to clean up that room. So they’re all going to pick up. They’re all going to contribute.
Denise: Now seems a good time to jump into how someone would start. And then I think we’ll talk a little bit about how you pay them. You told me about timing, the chores, timing, how long it takes to do a chore and how the budget is all based on that. So explain that.
Melanie: When we first were going through this process, it was like 10 o’clock at night, and Nate’s trying to figure out the budget and the system. And he says to me, “how long do you think it takes to wipe off a doorframe?” And I’m like, “I don’t know. Why are you asking me these dumb questions?”
Like I don’t, I don’t need to know that. And he’s like, I just want to make sure we’re giving the kids enough amount for what they’re doing, or like paying them what would be reasonable for this chore and like five minutes or a minute and a half, two minutes, maybe. I don’t know. And so he said, okay, well, when we start this, will you time these cards?
And I’m like, you want me to time all of these cards, he’s like, I’ll help when I can. I’m like, okay. But that was a matter of grabbing the cards before the kids would get to them because I got to time the easy ones, too. And so it took a couple of months to get all of them timed, but I would put the card on my board, start my timer, go get the supplies I needed for whatever chore I was working on. Go do the chore, come back and put the supplies away and they go back to the board and stop my timer. And then I would write that on the card.
Nathan: It is worth pointing out that the whole point of timing every chore and being specific and being meticulous about that was you don’t want to have some chores that the kids know are easy to do, but pay an unproportionate amount of commissions.
And so, and the same with us, I mean, the chore system is not just for the kids. We did it with the kids in mind, but everybody in the house, whether they’re friends or cousins that are staying over for the day, or mom and dad. Everybody’s expected to help with the housework where they can, and we wanted the commissions to be fair across the board, regardless of who was doing it.
If all of them are paying a commission relative to the amount of time in seconds, I know that sounds a little too meticulous, but it all worked out, then we know that the commissions are paid fairly and it allows those who are putting in the most work can be rewarded for their hard work.
Denise: Read me just a couple of those cards, the chore and how much they get paid for it so we can get an idea.
Nathan: Sure. Every card has two sides. The front side of the card has the title of the card and then there’s a big blue box around it, so we immediately recognize as a weekly chore. I’ve got vacuum the carpet in the master bedroom. On the front, it’s got the coin value of the commission. So I show a quarter, a nickel and a penny. On the back, it shows a commission with the numerical value. So 31 cents for vacuuming the carpet. So some of the other cards I got vacuum carpet theater room, and that one pays 36 cents. We have restock the toilet paper in all the bathrooms and important one. Right. And the commission for that is 20 cents.
Melanie: And then some from the monthly, we have wipe off doorframes in the main bathroom and that one’s 14 cents.
Nathan: Sorting the clean laundry. This is probably our biggest paying commission chore because this one is hard to break down into smaller bits, but whoever’s willing, and usually it’s our youngest child, she’s usually the one who wants to sort the clean laundry and she’s investing the time to do it. She’s going to get paid the highest commission which is a dollar and 12 cents.
Denise: Tell me how you know, how much money are you going to spend every month paying your kids and yourselves, for these chores?
Nathan: That’s the number we started with first. We said, how much are we going to budget toward our chore system in helping get work done around the house? We came up with that number first and we said, this is what we can afford to do. So let’s work backwards from that. I use an Excel sheet to break down that amount, the total payout by the frequency of the cards and how often they were being done and, and looked at the time per card.
We basically calculated it out so that all the commissions were evenly spread among those chore cards so that it would total the amount for the month. Now that sounds really complicated, but, if you’re putting conscious effort into your system and you’ll find a way that works for you and you’ll make adjustments the same as we did.
Melanie: And the thing is, is with this system, because everything is budgeted, we won’t ever go over our budget. We’ll always be under or right on budget with it because each chore fits within that budget amount.
Nathan: You know, this is a really important point because we have friends and we have family and we have others that have seen our system and we’ve made boards and systems for their houses as well. Oftentimes, and maybe some listeners are thinking this as well. I want to pay my kids well. I want to pay them at least 5 cents a chore or at least a dollar for this chore. The problem is those numbers add up really fast and you could be budgeting a hundred dollars a month, $200 a month towards a chore system.
And still, depending on the amount of work that has to be done, have chores that are only paying out 2 cents for that chore. And you may be tempted to think, well, that makes me feel like a cheapskate only paying somebody 2 cents to do this job. Well, we’re here to testify. The kids do not care and neither do we.
We don’t care how much the chore is paying us because it is our own little economy in the house and everything feels very fair at the end of the week. We don’t feel gypped because we’re not trying to compare it to how much fair market value would be for a maid to come in and do the house. But everybody, including us, we feel like we have accomplished something great. When we have earned more than a dollar in a day.
Melanie: You don’t want to give your kids a dollar to do baseboards. Yeah. It’s not worth the dollar to do baseboards. I mean, it might feel that way, the first time you do it, if you haven’t done your baseboards in a while, but when they’re done once a month and they’re clean and it takes less than two minutes to wipe down a baseboard in a room or, you know, get the whole room done. You’re like 10 cents is totally cool.
So they’ve learned that. They’ve learned how to know what’s a penny and what’s a nickel and what’s a dime and what’s a quarter and how much it’s worth. But they also aren’t worried about how much a chore is going to cost. They, most of the time, they’re like, I want to do this because it’s fun. It’s easy. I can get this one done. I know how to do this. Instead of. I can’t do that. I’m not, I don’t know how and they want to learn. And as you teach them the different chores in the harder chores, they’re more likely to pick those than the super easy ones. So once they found their groove, those are the ones that go to first.
Denise: That’s fantastic that they’re getting that sense of accomplishment and taking pride, taking pride in their work.
Melanie: Yes.
Denise: So your kids also, I know, do savings and they donate to charity with the money they make. Yes. So that’s something you’ve modeled and taught them. And I think that’s fantastic.
Nathan: There are many life lessons, there’s many financial lessons and habits that kind of naturally fall into place with a system like this, just getting your ducks in a row and, and, and making the conscious effort to use chores around the house, the home as an example of work and how you get paid for work, and using your money wisely. That’s the first thing that we’ve taught our kids with their money was you don’t just take this all and spend it on candy. We did 10% for tithing and charity. It’s really easy for the kids to calculate, but that tithing and charity was really hard for the kids in the beginning,
Melanie: They cried every Saturday morning as they would count up their money and we’d say, okay, 10% goes to your tithing charity area. And they’re like, “But it’s like all of my money.” And we’re like, “No, no, it’s not. You’ll be okay. It’s just 10%.” And they figured that out and that was okay until dad said, “Okay, are you ready to put some money towards savings?” “No, I need this!”
Like, it was devastating to learn about savings on top of the tithing. But now it’s, it’s second nature to them. They know that tithing comes out and then their savings and then the rest goes to their goals.
Nathan: It was valuable to learn that lesson in the beginning with something small, like charity and tithing, because we didn’t want them to grow up in and have a, such a tight grip on the money that they earn, that they lose sight of personal finance and, and being able to give that money away.
Denise: Let’s talk about benefits because we’re just naturally moving into that. The goals, they have a goal that they work to that’s on your board. So talk about that. That’s a little bit different kind of goal.
Melanie: We encourage them as we started to find something that would motivate them to help us do chores. A way that they could spend their money after they paid their tithing and their savings. We would let them get on Amazon. We let them look through Amazon and find something that they’re interested in. And then we will purchase that item and that’s their next goal. And they work towards that. Each month or each week, if they have money that they can put towards it, they add that to those goals until they’ve finished it.
Nathan: And logistically speaking, cause I’m sure there are people listening, wondering, well, how do we logistically go about this? We have a half sheet of paper that has their name on it. There’s a thermometer, a vertical thermometer on the side that shows the total value of the goal that they’re earning money toward and a little picture of the goal so that it’s visual and it helps them connect to it and they start looking at it more often. It reminds them what they’re working for and what they’re working towards something that they’re excited about. Every week when we pay out their commissions, any money that they have left over, they go to our board where all those pages are taped and they will color in the thermometer up to whatever they have paid or they add that amount to the thermometer for the week.
Denise: And I bet that is so exciting. So rewarding to just fill in. Even as an adult, I wouldn’t be excited by that.
Melanie: Yeah. I use two different colors, so I can see week to week, how much I’ve put towards that goal, cause sometimes, if you use same color every time you’re like. How much did I actually put towards that?
Denise: Alternating colors. And forward-thinking you are teaching your kids forward thinking.
Melanie: Yes.
Denise: And I like how you said that you encourage them not to just get little trinkety stuff, but to go big, to dream big.
Melanie: As time went on, as we’ve worked through their budgets, we realized that they were earning a lot of money, but they would buy like little tiny things, like little Lego sets or little like pop-it toys, or, you know, just a lot of little trinkets. And this year we said, okay, go bigger. Make it a little bit bigger of a goal and kind of stretch them a little bit and encouraged them to really think about what they wanted instead of just, oh, I’m interested in this.
Denise: And when you go to the store, you mentioned this to me, Melanie, there’s none of that, “Buy me this, buy me that.”
Melanie: Oh no, no. And I love it because they know that if they really want something that we’re going to say, “well, it can be your next goal”. Now they say, can this be my next goal? Or like, they want to buy books from the book fair. We’ll say, okay, well that can be your next goal.
And we hold onto it until they’ve earned it. And they’re totally fine with that. They are fine going to the book fair and finding a book and that being the next goal. Every kid likes to go to the book fair. And when I was a kid, I always wanted to get something from the book fair, but we didn’t buy things from the book fair.
And so it was kind of rough as a kid, not being able to have what I wanted or when I asked for it. But they, a lot of times we’ll be in a store and they’ll see something and they’ll come up to us. “Can this be my next goal please, please? Can it be my next goal?” And I’m like, “Sure.” If, and sometimes it takes a while to get to that goal because they’ll have two or three other goals in front of it, but they know that that’s the way that things go.
Nathan: And it makes it really easy for us as parents to say yes. “Yes, you can have that for sure as your next goal.” And they get excited, because we’re not shutting them down and they know what that means. Okay. I’m going to work for this cause I really want it. And if they don’t want it, I mean, they, they get to evaluate on the spot.
Melanie: We also have family goals. We have games for the Switch and those things are goals that we all work it together for so that we can all play those games. So everybody will put money towards the games and help purchase those games or other family goals.
Denise: Sure. Cause that makes it fair. Like you talked about, kids are very concerned about that.
So I liked that you have those family goals.
Nathan: Yeah. That’s exactly right. We have some family goals. They have a card, just like anything else. If it’s a half sheet of paper on the board with a thermometer and a picture and people can go in with their marker at the end of the week in color, in and pitch in on that goal.
And it makes it really easy to see, okay, who really wants us? Who’s putting money towards this? Who doesn’t care? Who hasn’t pitched in? And that’s not something we need to enforce. They hold themselves accountable and they will approach each other. “Hey, we know you’re going to play this game with us too. Why aren’t you pitching in?”
Denise:That is great. You don’t even have to get involved.
Denise: What I’m hearing is the setup is a little bit hard.
Melanie: Yes.
Denise: But once you get into this, it’s easier. This is an easier way to keep your house clean. This is an easier way to have the household run smoothly.
Nathan: What it comes down to us. I think what’s really worked in our favor or what this system has brought us is it’s, it’s made it manageable. It’s predictable, you know, what has to be done, you know, everything’s accounted for. This may sound overwhelming, but if you were to count each time that we move a single card, representing a piece of work, from our backlog, which is where all of the chores sit that are not being worked on yet, every time we move that card all the way through the system to Done, meaning that, that, that card is done.
If you count that as one move, we move 1,802 tasks in a month. And that sounds like a lot. And it sounds like it’s insurmountable. But, because we’ve identified all the work that needs to be done. And because we’ve identified how to get there in a month, we’ve reduced it down to something that’s very simple for even the youngest of our children to be able to do. The way we get that seemingly insurmountable amount of work done is two green, two blue, two purple. And that’s all you need to do in the day.
By doing that small and simple task, you, by the end of the month, have done so much work and it doesn’t feel like you’ve done anything. We get all the chores done before the kids go to school. We don’t have to worry about it after the kids go to bed and we can take breaks on holidays. We can take breaks whenever we want to from our chore system, because we know we’re getting it done.
Denise: That is simply amazing. I wish I’d had this when my kids were young. There’s one more thing I wanted to bring up because you did mention to me that you have a friend that you created a board for, and she had been through some trauma and it just helped her. So explain that a little bit.
Melanie: So she’s had some really rough weeks and, just by looking at the system, like looking at what chores she needs to get done, she can simply pick a card and go put it on the board. And she knows that that’s the task she needs to get done and she doesn’t need to worry about anything else at that time. It’s, I’m going to go clean the blinds in the living room. That’s my job right now. I don’t need to worry about anything else. That’s what I’m going to do. And it gives her focus and perspective, and she can get a lot done because she’s just focusing on those simple chores. With her kids to , she has an autistic son and they are loving their system.
They have really taken off with it and loved working with it. She said her house is finally getting organized and it’s helping her a lot.
Nathan: I think it’s worth pointing out. She has felt overwhelmed and she has so much in her life because she is a single mom and she’s got kids that, that require attention too. She’s going to work. She’s been going to school. She’s got a full plate. It can feel very unmanageable. Right. And, and the stress that’s associated with that is really high. And there are many listeners who understand what that’s like, where you just feel like it’s impossible.
We told her, just put it together, all the daily tasks that she wanted to do, like reading with her kids. So she’s got a separate card for each child for her to spend some time and read with them. All these little things that you feel are impossible to get done in the day, she’s now able to do because it is manageable. It is in front of her.
This is another advantage or benefit. There’s something to be said about having a system like this that’s in front of you all the time. That’s high touch, not necessarily high tech.
When it’s something you can interact with and see, regardless of whether or not it’s plugged in. Regardless of whether or not you’ve got power to the house. Whatever the circumstances are that would normally stop you from being able to open your app or open it an iPad, or your phone or a computer to access your chore system.
My background project management and helping professional software engineers who are writing apps and who are living technology and have their hands in it every single day, this is how they manage their work.
It’s with sticky notes on the wall, it’s with sticky notes on a window, it’s using Kanban systems like this. They don’t use apps all the time for tracking their work. The most effective way for them is sticking notes on a wall. And that’s what we’ve done.
Denise: Glorified, sticky notes. I must say, the board is beautiful.
Melanie: It’s in our dining room and everybody sees it every day. They walk past it multiple times a day and it’s there and they know where things go and they know how it works and they move on their own. There are times where we’re telling them, you need to move your card if it’s done though, because we can’t pay you, if it’s not done. If it hasn’t moved from ready in progress, and we have an approved it, you don’t get paid for it cause it’s just sitting in your work in progress. So there are challenges like that, where we’ve got to remind them and they don’t always move the cards over. And then they tell us the next day “I did that yesterday. I just didn’t move it over. I’m sorry.” And they’re a little upset because they didn’t get paid for that. But I just remind them, you’ve got to move it over. Otherwise we don’t know if you’ve really done it.
My mom has said that she loves how easy it is to just look at the chores and just be able to do them. Just easy, basic things that anybody could help do. In fact, we have a lot of the kids’ friends that will come over and they’ll be like, what is this? We’ll be like, this is our chore system. And some of our kids will say, “You can do some, if you want. We’ll pay you.” Because anybody that does the chore they’ll get paid because there’s that commission has already in their budget.
Denise: It’s Tom Sawyer and whitewashing the fence. That’s what it is with the kids wanting to do the chores.
Melanie: Yeah, they do. And we have some nieces and nephews that when they come over that they’re like, can I help with chores? Sure.
Nathan: But instead of playing, they’re doing chores and they’re so excited about it because they know they’re going to get paid for these chores. So they’re going to our chore board, they’re grabbing chores and they’re doing chores and they’re excited about it.
And they’re talking about it and they’re talking about how many can I do now? And their dad saw them and said, what are you guys doing chores here for? Why are you doing chores at their house, but we can’t get you to do chores at our house?
I know we’ve talked a little bit about the benefits to some kids. There is a boy, we won’t say his name, but he’s a friend of ours and he’s got autism and he loves coming over. When they are here to do the chores, that’s what he does to play. He likes the predictability, the stability and the structure around our chore system, because he knows if I do these things, I’m going to get paid this much money and it’s something he can put his attention toward and feel totally fine with it. And he loves that. And so his mom again said, “I love how my kids are engaged in chores in that way. Can you build me a system?” And so that’s kind of how that one came about.
Nathan: Something that’s been valuable for the kids to learn with this system has been accountability for the work that they said they did, but they didn’t do. There’s a reason why we have a column for work in progress and a middle column for ready for approval. They can move their cards from work in progress to ready for approval. But only mom and dad are allowed to move cards from ready for approval to done, because it’s not up to them, who did the work, to determine whether they did a good job or not?
It’s up to mom and dad. They can say they did it all that they want, but if we go up and we see that it’s not done, we move that card back to work in progress and tell them they can’t do anything else until that, that chores done.
Melanie: They’re not always happy about that. Sometimes they argue a little bit about it being done. Like I did that, but we know how long the chores take. If they say I did the blinds in the living room and I’ve only seen them spend about two minutes on the blinds, that’s not quite enough time to get all the way dusted and wiped off.
Denise: So what you’re teaching them is to be closers. That’s what the term Dr. Korb uses in his book. These kids need to learn how to be closers. Finish the job and do it well.
Nathan: Oftentimes when there are challenges with people rushing through a job, it’s because there’s some external urgency that’s brought to the equation. Like they have a friend that they want to go play with, or they have a game they want to get back to. If you’re going to get paid commission for it, you’re going to do the work right.
Denise: I really like how it takes you as the parent into a sort of impartial role, not just do this, do this, do this, but this is the job that needs to be done and I need to approve it.
And these are the standards we have set. And have you met them?
Nathan: It’s easy to enforce something when you’ve got a card that specifically calls out what needs to be done, because then mom and dad are not the bad guys. We’re just enforcing something that they knew that they needed to do. We can say, look, I’m looking at the card right now.
That’s the work you said you were going to do. You know what work is required. It’s not done. So let’s move it back and go do it again. And I’ll move the card. As soon as you’ve done it, like, I’ll move it as soon as you’re done. So it’s really up to them.
Denise: Thank you so much, Nate and Melanie. This has been fantastic. I think so many people could benefit from this. The busy, hectic lives we lead now, I think it’s easier to let things go than maybe it was generations ago. And to live with a certain amount of messiness and clutter and not being clean.
I love what you’re doing and you’ve wrapped up all these good things in it, teaching the responsibility and the value of money and the incentive to work and preparing your kids to just succeed when they go out in the world. They’re not going to be failure to launch kids.
As SLPs, we run into kids like that because they have challenges with executive functioning. They have challenges with planning ahead, kids with autism, often end up in their parents’ basement sometimes because they haven’t learned this and they are what we call, you know, failure to launch. She just didn’t figure out how to get help in the world and be an adult. Well, I think this could answer some of those issues, so thank you very much.
Nathan: Absolutely. It’s been said often and, and this is a good closing thought. The most important work we can ever do is within the walls of our own home. I take that very literally, as far as the most important work that we do is our housework and to be able to organize it in a way that helps our kids grow and build self dependence emotionally, and with their work ethic, all of these, these side benefits come from a result of us doing this work in our home.
I am a therapist and entrepreneur, clinic owner, published author, and creator of speech therapy materials.
The Speech Umbrella is run by Denise Stratton, Reach out with any questions.