Getting Your Family Involved with House Cleaning

If getting your family involved in house cleaning seems like a fantasy, or if they help but not willingly, you are not alone. Not many people like to clean, children included, but it's got to be done. If you follow some of this advice, you will have a family who cleans together (& stays together?), and doesn't hate it. Also, once you have other people doing some of the cleaning, the work will not fall all on you.

Have a family house cleaning meeting

Especially if you (mom) have been cleaning up other people's messes for some time, this meeting may not be a happy one. A good way to start is to have each person say what their definition of a clean house is. Once everyone in the family has had a say, see if you can figure out a way to bring them all together and come up with a list of chores that are right for your family. It is also a good idea to work out some kind of a reward system for completing chores; extra TV time, a chance to skip a chore, choice of desert or meal, etc., are all rewards that most children will respond to. Along with rewards, be sure to remind them of the consequences, such as no clean clothes to wear or lost and broken toys or games.

Have a family house cleaning day

If daily chores or chore charts just aren't right for your family, an alternative way of getting everyone involved in house cleaning is to have a family cleaning day. This is also good for spring cleaning, which is a big job for one person to handle alone. A family cleaning day can be fun. Make sure you schedule it on a day that nothing else is going on; you may have to schedule it a few weeks in advance. Get all of your cleaning supplies together before that day, so you don't have to run out to the store and interrupt your cleaning "groove." A good way to ensure that family cleaning day is a success is to assign certain tasks to certain people, then reward them when finished, either monetarily or in other ways. Another idea is to hide little treats in places that they can only be found if the person is cleaning.