I’ve been trying to write an insightful and suitably indignant post about the brewing robocall scandal but words fail me. My oldest daughter is watching the Oscars and between the endless chatter and my incoming Twitter feed, I can’t gather my thoughts… so in the mean time, I thought I would tell you about what I drive.
Any parent of a large family can probably confirm that people are curious about our means of locomotion. We have a large family and so we drive a large van. My van looks somewhat like this:
It’s a 15-passenger van but we don’t use the back bench, making it an 11-passenger van. With a family of 10, it fills-up quite nicely.
We also have a minivan that we use for driving around. I won’t try to justify the minivan by saying that it’s cheaper to have a second vehicle than to pay the gas on the utility van… but it’s a close call! We calculated that when gas hits around the $1.25 / litre mark, you can justify buying a small commuter car by the savings on gas.
Anyway, this is not really what this post is about. What I want to tell you is that nobody want to buy these suckers when they cost over $100 to fill-up. We bought ours for a song in 2008 when gas prices soared to $1.30. We “only” had 5 children then and could still fit in a minivan but we knew that we would have more children.
I’m telling you this because gas prices have been increasing lately. You can read about it here. Ideally, you would purchase your large-family van in November, December, January, when Christmas gift shopping takes over car shopping and dealers are begging you to take last year’s models off their real estate. But with gas prices the way they are going, I wouldn’t rule out some good deals up the pipe. If there is a large van in your future, start looking.
Pour mes lecteurs francophones: Voici une traduction de ma publication “Famille nombreuse de 7 enfants dans maison trop petite”. Vous pouvez trouver la publication originale ici.
The most entertaining part — and it can become an obsession — of owning a blog is to read the site stats, especially the search engine terms summary. For those who are unfamiliar with the technical underbelly of blogging, every time someone lands on my blog following a Google search (or any of the other search engines) I get a little note in my stats telling me what those searches were. It allows me to make better use of the tags (and change some language, especially in French regarding twins nursing, that tends to attract, ah, er, readers that are not exactely looking for family fare *cough*). All this to say that someone landed on my blog while looking for “Large family with 7 children in house too small”. I was inspired.
Now, by popular demand, I am translating this post. Ok, one person requested. But we’re all about customer service here!
First, in the interest of full disclosure, I must tell you that I do not live in a house too small with my large family. In fact, my house is too large and I dream of designing and building the smallest house a family of 10 can comfortably occupy. When I say that I dream of living in the smallest possible house, what I mean is that I dream of a house I can keep clean. Unlike this one:
My guess is that the owners of this house -- currently being built in my area -- are not the ones cleaning it.
My husband, who has a design hobby, drew a 1,300 sq. ft house for our family inspired by the ideas found in Sarah Susanka’s The Not So Big House: A Blueprint fot the Way We Really Live. I have no doubt that it is possible to live in a house too small for a family with 7 children. However, what is usually lacking in North American houses is not so much space as well-designed space.
It reminded me of a conversation with a friend. When she and her husband bought their suburban house, they thought “This house is a good size for 3 or 4 children!” She added: “In another country, a mom like me would look at this house and say ‘This house is a good size for 3 or 4 families!'” And the families would probably be bigger!
Big enough for 3 or 4 children or 3 or 4 families?
You can observe the evolution of what is considered an appropriate house-size for a family by moving from the downtown area of most Canadian cities toward the suburbs. I’m always reminded, whenever I see this type of bungalow (below) that they were once considered a good size for 3 or 4 children. They usually have 3 bedrooms, one bathroom, a kitchen with an eating area and a living-room. The basements were meant as storage, as witnessed by the size of the windows in the foundation: you could not build an insurable bedroom with windows that size. Some houses had single attached garages.
A single family house in 1950-60
In today’s suburb, a single-family home has two storeys, a finished (or finishable) basement, a kitchen with eating area, a dining room, a family room, a living room, 4 bedrooms and a double garage. And yet, several features show that these houses were built for families of 4 and can feel cramped for a large family. Even in our too-large house, we redesigned some areas to make them more practical for our growing family. Here are a few thoughts in no particular order:
1. Do not limit yourself to what should be in a single family house. Yes, most houses have a family room and a living room but most people do not have 5, 6, 7, 8 children. We used to live in a house with an eat-in kitchen, a dining room, a family room and a living room. In other words, two eating spaces and two resting spaces. We had a wall built between the living room and the dining room and turned them into a music room and a home office. Then we had a resting space, an eating space, a study space and a piano space.
2. Open concept areas were not invented by parents of a large family. We used to live in a house with a cathedral ceiling in the kitchen open to the second storey and a front hallway open to the second storey. Visitors would be all: “This is great! This way you always know what the kids are doing!” Maybe, but when my husband was grinding coffee at 6:30 am in the kitchen, he could have been grinding it right in the baby’s room for the difference it made in the level of noise. Not to mention that you could not have a kid practicing piano in the living room while another was doing homework or watching tv in another room. Avoid open concept or try to close it off.
3. Think function. When we moved in our actual house, two of the children’s room had huge walk-in closets. We turned the walk-in in the boys’ bedroom in a small 3-piece bathroom (toilet, sink, shower) and a small laundry room, separated by sliding doors. Believe me, I appreciate my upstairs laundry room more than my boys decry the absence of a closet. Where do they put their clothes? Right now, we re-purposed bookshelves but it does look a bit disheveled. We will eventually get a couple of Ikea wardrobes.
A little messy but you get the idea. This used to be a walk-in closet.
4.Beware of yourself. Too often, our houses become too small because of too much stuff, not to much people. I know families who perform miracles with very large families in very tight quarters (we’re talking 8 kids in a 3-bedroom row-house with no backyard) and still manage to make their space look bright and cheerful. These people are, without exception, compulsive about what they bring into their house and what they keep there. They do not keep anything that has lost its function or outlived its usefulness and they certainly don’t get emotionally attached to stuff. For a good dose of motivation on the cost of clutter — personal and financial — I recommend Is There a Life After Housework? from Don Aslett. In a nutshell, if you have any storage area dedicated to things you no longer know what to do with, see part of every mortgage payment as rent for your stuff.
I realized while writing this post that we have done a lot of small changes to our living areas to make them more family friendly. My husband suggested that I expand on that in future posts, which I will do. Eventually.
1 one new English word I learned this week: distaff. In French, the word for distaff (“quenouille”) is also used to describe the pollen-holding part of the reed (“roseau”) as in “Holy Cow there’s a lot of pollen in a distaff!”
On our daily walk, we picked a "quenouille" and my daughter asked if she could pick it apart. "Sure", I said,"Here's a bowl."Aaaaaah.... Lesson learned (or rather "remembered from childhood")
2 two pet-peeves (bear with me, I don’t have many): TV doctors wearing scrubs and lab coats. Really? I didn’t realize that you had to be sterile to explain how the excretory system works to a camera. And Gmail. I can’t understand how a web service with a user interface that is so counter-intuitive can make so much money. Oh, wait, that’s right, they’re not making money from the users of the interface, they’re merely selling access to their users to marketers. I’ve been trying to find an attachement for a couple of hours now, I think I clicked on just about every icon on my screen. User interfaces like this are why it’s so hard to teach my mother-in-law how to use her iPod. “Yes, I can see the pictures but I don’t know how to open just one.” “Touch it.” “Touch what?” “The picture” ” What do you mean??” “Just touch the picture you want to see Grandma!” “Aaaaaaah! So easy!” All this time spent trying to open a stupid attachement is giving me too much opportunity to notice the targeted ads on the sidebar. Hey marketers, tell your clients that when I see their ad as I’m reading a personal email on a related topic, I’m spooked. Not tempted to buy their products. Spooked. And considernig closing my Gmail account. This book The Daily Youby Joseph Turow is next on my reading list.
3 three feet is how far my baby daughter throws up when she burps. I love babies but not the part where I walk through life stinking of sour milk.
Better out than in I always say!Mom? Could you, uh, like, put down the camera and maybe clean me up? Maybe?
4 four crying out loud! When they say you shouldn’t type anything into a computer (and especially online) you wouldn’t want read in a court of law, that’s what they meant: Ottawa jogger sues blind runners for crashing into her . See that last paragraph?
“We Googled her name to see who she was and it showed that she ran a race in April 2010, so if she was hurt so bad that she said she’s been unable to run, why is her name listed for running a 10-k months later?” Dunkerley asked.”
5 five… I don’t have a five… Except, wait, five fingers way up (as in “High Five” ) to all the moms out there on the “mommy track”. Earlier this week I was asked by a TV research assistant how I was balancing out work and family. I’m not, I said. “Balancing out” work and family is a game of fractions where what you give to one you don’t give to the other. The idea of balance or equilibrium means that you are somehow giving equal parts to both plates. I like my work but I don’t want work and family to balance. Family comes first and in my case, it means that I write MP correspondence part-time with a graduate degree in law. I will never fly in the Prime Minister’s plane but I will always be home in time to make a healthy diner for my family. So give me a high five if you’re with me on the mommy track, over-educated and under-employed, and not resenting the workplace for being different than the family place. ‘Cuz the workplace is missing something crucial and that’s my children.
Pour mes lecteurs francophones: “Friday’s Mixed Nuts” est un ramassis d’anecdotes et de faits divers rassemblés au cour de la semaine.
1 one vegetarian recipe my kids all love: blackbean quesadilla from Canadian Living.com I serve it with salsa, sour cream and guacamole. I always double the recipe and we eat the leftover filling by the spoonful. I also warm-up the leftovers in a pan, throw-in some cheese and top it with diced avocado. It’s a gazillion time better when the salsa was made with love by your own mother using your own homegrown tomatoes and jalapenos. A little jar of spicy summer heat in the dead of winter.
2 two blogs I found this week that inspired me: The Lucas Adventures (family with 4 children and a touching adoption story from Rwanda) and Crackers (a homemade food blog about eating well, something I try to do in part by growing my own tomatoes and having other people make the salsa — Merci Maman et Faustina!)
3 three sizes of black socks is how I deal with the laundry for 20 feet (well 16 really since the twins don’t count yet). Large black socks for mom, dad and the two larger children, medium black socks for the two medium children and small black socks for the little boy. Clean socks live in a laundry basket and people play mix-and-match as required.
4 four kilometers is how far I ran on icy sidewalks with my dog and my jogging stroller. You can read about it in the Running Diaries’ First Run post.
5 five billion dollars is what Facebook will file to raise in its initial public offering (IPO). According to the company, its revenue rose by 65% is 2011 from 3-ish million $ to 1 billion. Ever wondered what made Facebook so valuable? It depends who you ask. According to founder Mark Zuckerberg, it is seizing the opportunity to connect people and building the tools that enable these connections. Uh? Since I don’t pay a dime for connecting with my friends there has to be more: investors are not paid in “connections”. Mashable has the real story here. In case you were wondering, Facebook is a giant advertizing bucket. We users are not the clients, we are the product. That’s good to keep in mind as Facebook prepares to put your personal information on show whether you want it or not. Is this a big deal? It depends how you feel about online privacy. Still, you may want to read this before embracing the mandatory timeline.
I concluded my previous post on teens and discipline by telling you about the essay as a discipline tool. You can find part 1 of Learning from their mistakeshere.
Have you ever sent a child to her room to think about what she’d done? Do you really think, while she’s there, that she is pondering on the great wrong she’s done to you? If you do, I hate to burst your bubble. Your child is more likely reflecting on how great a victim she is. Assuming she is not reading, sleeping, surfing the Net or watching TV (but your children don’t have TV in their room, right?? If they do, we must have words). Let’s be honest: when we send a child to their room to “think”, what we are really saying is:
I’m really annoyed by your behaviour, please get out of my space while I regain my composure.
Agreed?
The result of sending a child to his room may not always be as intended but we are on to something with the idea of reflecting on one’s behaviour and understand where it failed. The problem with “go to your room” is that we are not nurturing our children’s budding moral development by shooing them off to “think” by themselves.
When it comes to teenagers, the development of a reliable sense of right and wrong is essential and time sensitive: a teenager in grade 10 (15-16) could be moving out to study in 2-3 years. If they are not learning self-control, impulse-management and developping a moral fiber, they can be in for a world of trouble. When I tell my teenagers to “go think about what you’ve done” I mean it in a way I may not have meant when they were little.
In Good Discipline, Great Teens, Dr. Ray Guarandi suggests using essays instead of lectures to teach discipline. I met Dr. Ray some years ago when I was on the organizing committee for a parenting conference where he was the speaker. His talks are like stand-up routines: we laughed so hard it hurt. But don’t get fooled by the funnies: while his delivery is hilarious, his approach to discipline is serious. After the conference, we went out for dinner with Dr. Ray and I asked him: “That strong discipline approach sounds great in theory but the parents I know who have discipline problems with their teenagers never had a backbone. Shouldn’t they change their approach gradually?”. His reply really left an image that inspires most of my parenting nowadays. He said: “Did you ever drink sour milk thinking it was fresh? When you realize you have a mouthfull of sour milk, do you spit it out gradually or all at once?” When there is something wrong with your children, whether its too much backtalk, too much computer or failing grades, you need to face it head on. Here is a quote from Good Discipline, Great Teens that encapsulates Dr. Ray’s approach:
Dear Dr. Ray, Any words for dealing with a fifteen-year-old who is verbally demeaning to his two younger sisters (…), sometimes abusively so?
Yes. Stop him.
He does give more pointed advice on ways to stop the bad behaviour. But he doesn’t buy the “teens will be teens” schtick. At all. Yes, teens will be teens and this may involve some attitude, back talk and abuse. But it doesn’t mean that you, as parent, have to take it, indulge it or bear it out. Being called over and over on their bad behaviour — and believe me, I have two teens, I cannot overstate how often “over and over” means — is how we imprint on their developping brain what is morally and socially acceptable (and what will get them sued, fired or dumped).
But back to essays. Last December, my husband and I were confronted with a discipline problem involving two of our four oldest children. The offense involved going behind our backs to do something they knew they were not allowed to do. For a few weeks before they got busted, these two children were increasingly short-tempered, rude and difficult. I thought maybe they were overtired or reacting to the twins’ birth, whatever. In hindsight, I think that living a lie was eating away at their souls. When we confronted them, it was very important for us to convey that the material offense wasn’t nearly as big a deal as the lying. The way we approached this was to have a family meeting where we told them (again) about the family rule they had transgressed and why it was in place. We told the children that we knew that two of them had gone beyond our backs. The transgressors were grounded for at least two weeks (except for school and sports) and their computer priviledges were removed (the computer was the instrument of the transgression). Then we assigned them with two written projects. The projects had to be handed-in before the computer priviledges could be regained and the grounding lifted. Both children had to present a written apology with an explanation of what went through their heads when they decided to go behind our backs. They also had to write an essay (500 words for the youngest and 2000 for the oldest) on personal integrity, personal dignity and respect for parental authority. The oldest of the two also had to do a bit of research on why the family rule he-or-she had transgressed was important.
When they handed back their essays and apologies, I was taken aback with how much thought they had put into their work. Here are some exerpts, published with permission from their authors (as long as I keep them anonymous). On respect for parental authority the youngest of the two wrote:
You can see your parents like your boss at work. They tell you what to do and you must obey. But instead of paying you with money, they pay you with love. Another difference is that you will never get fired. In other words, they will always love you no matter what you do.
On personal integrity, the oldest of the two wrote (I really wish I could quote the entire essay, it’s that good):
Integrity. The first image that comes to mind is that of a brick wall. Solidly built, unshakeable and most of all, strong. Every component, every brick, is held together by mortar. Remove a brick and the wall isn’t complete. Remove the mortar and the wall doesn’t hold.
Personal human integrity isn’t all that different. Your values are the bricks, held together by honesty, your mortar. Without your values, your wall of integrity isn’t complete. Without honesty, your bricks will not hold together.
Giving them an essay topic allowed us to put the emphasis on the lesson we wanted the children to learn. The grounding and removal of priviledges were tools to make sure that the children had the time and leisure to work on their essays and also provided motivation for finishing the essays in a timely fashion. I am now thinking of using essays as a gateway for earning more priviledges. For instance, before allowing your child/teen to have a Facebook page, you could ask for a short essay (500 words is very manageable for a 10-12 year-old child) on data mining or online privacy protection or cyber-bullying. Making your teens do the research and writing will always beat a lecture, take it from me.
If I title a post on parenting teenagers “Learning from their mistakes” you may think that the post will be about getting teenagers to learn from their mistakes. But I’m not so delusional as to give you such hope: I have to assume that teenagers learn from their mistakes because I once was a teenager, I learned from my mistakes, and I am a relatively well adjusted adult. Beyond that, beats me. No, the title of this post refers to what I — the parent — am learning from disciplining my teens in the great adventure of parenting.
When my four oldest children were little, countless well-meaning strangers told me to enjoy them while they were young because once they hit the teenage years it would be all downhill from there. I was never afraid of the teenage years however. I had a happy teenage-hood. I remember getting along well with my parents and my siblings. I had no interest in drugs and alcohol and I had no major academic issues (I had no clue about anything mathematics or scientific but I did get my high school diploma. This suggests that I had enough of a clue to pass whatever it was I had to pass. But it’s still a mystery.) My experience chatting with other parents is that the amount of fear a parent feels toward their children’s upcoming teenage years is directly proportional to the amount of grief they gave their own parents as teenagers. Call it cosmic payback.
Now that we are more firmly rooted in teenage-dom with each passing year (we have two card-carrying teenagers with a third one coming up the pipe) I can say that parenting teenagers — so far — has been an experience in mixed emotions. It’s in equal parts more fun, challenging and infuriating than parenting young children.
It’s more fun because teenagers have a sense of humour. They are quirky, they love a good joke and their malleable brain seems to have an infinite capacity to memorize skits and one-liners. It’s easy to laugh with them (and sometimes at them…). Their sense of humour if often dark and off-kilter and if you don’t take yourself too seriously — because they can give it as well as they take it — you can be in for a good time. I also find that my teenagers are keen observers of human nature without the politically correct varnish that develops with age. A varnish is not always a bad thing but sometimes I wish I still had the ability to call a spade a spade the way my teens do.
Having fun with gourdsTeenagers like to make funny faces
It’s more challenging because the stakes are higher. Higher stakes mean that you are under pressure to make the right discipline call at the right time. What do I mean by that? When raising young children, you often make discipline calls that are either bone-headed or counter-productive. Have you ever spanked a child in anger? Hit a child for hitting a sibling? Flew off the handle after catching a liar? Great. Now your child is learning that hitting is a good way to blow off steam, hitting is a good response to injury and that his lying skills need improvement. The consequences of those bad discipline calls are mild. Unless you repeat them regularly over several years, they won’t make your child into violent liar. If the balance of your parenting is loving and forgiving you’ll get another kick at the can in a few days. But teenagers can make mistakes that will hunt them for the rest of their lives: get pregnant, flunk high school and crash a car full of friends. Even if your concerns are of a lesser order of magnitude — as mine are, thank God — you still need to be on the ball and ready to roll. Your teen is flunking high school math because he couldn’t be bothered? Sure you can take his iPod away for a week. He still flunked math. And closed the door to every paycheque-friendly faculty, like engineering, medicine, business, dentistry, you name it! I don’t want my teens to learn a life-lesson from flunking math and science out of sheer laziness: I want them to succeed. If they decide to get an English major, it won’t be because nobody else would let them in. Get it? Stakes, higher.
It’s more frustrating because teens push your buttons at a more adult level and really bring you face to face with your shortcomings as a parent. When you lose your “composure” at a 3 year-old, they still come to you for comfort. When you fly off the handle and start ranting at a teenager (two big teenage no-nos, don’t ask me how I know), they think you’re a loser. (Now, if you have done your job right up to this point, your teenagers will know better than to tell you to your face — although my son has been known to exhibit a death wish in that regard: the kid has no filter.) What really rounds-up the challenging and frustrating parts is the well-documented fact that teens really think that they have reached the apogee of knowledge and good judgement. Now, if you reach the apogee of knowledge and good judgement at 15, and the only way from an apogee is down, you can imagine where, in a teen’s mind, the parent is situated on the apogee-to-perigee-continuum: it takes 15 years to get to the top, and it’s all downhill from there, and you are say, almost 40, it means that you’ve been on a downward trajectory from knowledge and good judgement for, like… (40 – 15 = uh…) 25-ish years, rounded-up to the nearest brain fart.
Teenagers challenge, push buttons and seek out limits. Sometimes, you will blow it as a parent and they will let you know. But sometimes you will be right… and they will still challenge, push buttons and explain to you why you are wrong, wrong, wrong. The high-wire number is to know when to stand firm and when to go hat in hand apologize for your mistakes. The first thing I learned from parenting teens is to take a step back and take a deep breath. Unless your child is at the police station right now it never hurts to put a little time between you and an issue (and even then, spending the night in prison might not be an entirely bad thing…). The second lesson I learned, which flows from the first one, is to lower your voice, ideally to the point where you are not saying any words. It never hurts to hear a teenager’s grievance. Sometimes they may be right! Just don’t confuse listening with arguing or agreeing. For instance, we have a strict, unbending and controversial no-sleepover rule. This is not popular with my oldest daughter. Listening to her grievance and why we are wrong, wrong, wrong will not make me agree with her. Nor will I argue for the zillionth time why this is so. But it doesn’t hurt to sit down and hear her out. Again.
In part 2 of this post,I will tell you about a discipline tool I took too long to get out of the toolbox: the essay.
New Year’s Day must be right around the corner judging by the high rotation of TV ads for debt consolidation and weight loss products. January must be Boxing Month for the good folks at Fitness Depot, Weight Watchers and gyms everywhere. I have been thinking of re-joining Weight Watcher for a while but I don’t want to do it in January. Smacks too much of pre-ordered failure.
(As an aside, my spell-checker is taking issue with the word “pre-order” which is leading me down a philosophical path of reflection on pre-ordering. This should be the neologism of the year, a completely made-up notion for the purpose of online marketing. Think about it. What does pre-order mean? Before ordering. What is there before ordering? Not a whole lot. You order pizza because you want pizza. The order comes before the pizza but what comes before the order? The stomach grumble? The twinkle in the eye? Ordering is by definition an initiation of something. We only started pre-ordering stuff when Amazon thought it would be a good way of preventing potential clients from walking over to their nearest bookstore once the latest Harry Potter became available. Might as well wait for UPS, it’s been pre-ordered…)
Last year, I poached a retrospective from another blog. It’s a series of questions meant to make you go back on the year just over. They are superficial — what did you do on your birthday? — rather than life-changing but it’s very entertaining a year later. It’s like The Economist’s The World in… forecast issue. It’s always a good read when it comes out but not as much as it is a year later.
As it turned out, 2011 was The Year of the Twins. I spent the first 9 months of the year pregnant and the last 3 caring for two infants. And that sums it up! Here’s one question that makes me roll on the floor laughing:
2. Did you keep your new year’s resolutions, and will you make more for next year?
I was committed to losing those damned “last 10 pounds” but I put on 30 instead. I wanted to start hosting dinner parties for my adult friends, without kids. Instead I had an army of friends making me frozen dinners and bringing supper to my house. I wanted to take the children swimming and skating more often. Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha!Ha! *Wheeze* . I wanted to make more time for friends and family, instead I lost touch with people I care deeply about. I have only managed to keep close to my closest friends because they don’t take no for an answer and invite themselves over. It seems like the twins have made us even more insular than we already were.
Here’s another side-stitcher:
8. What was your biggest achievement of the year?
Army Half Marathon. Getting out of bed at 5:00 am to run before work last spring.
ROAR! Getting out of bed at 4:45 to grab the first bus, getting off downtown and running 7.5 km at the crack of dawn in frigid weather before heading to work. It was cold, it was wet… and I have wonderful memories of it! Running will ruin your brain that way… This year, I hope to go for a walk. Once.
But I wasn’t laughing anymore when I started reflecting on this one:
13. What did you get really excited about?
We had twins and that was exciting but more like a slow burn. For sure, the birth was a lifetime high. But that must be, in my opinion, one of the saddest part of being constantly exhausted and busy: I don’t get excited about anything anymore. The grind of getting anything done gets the excitement factor out of things that should have been — or used to be — exciting. Like running my boss’ re-election campaign. Nothing is exciting anymore, it’s all in degrees of “exhausting”: somewhat, mildly, very, completely…
And maybe this will be my Twin-First-Year-Totally-Manageable-New-Year-Resolution: get excited about something. Change my outlook. Stop seeing things in degrees of exhaustion and start getting excited again! (I feel like I should add some exclamation marks here)!!!!!!!!
I promised a series in a few parts on kids and chores. This second part on how to get kids to perform their assigned chores should come with two caveat.
Parenting advice often come through a bit condescending and when written by parents with real-life children, it often makes the children look perfect. My children are not perfect and they do not enjoy chores more than I do. They sometimes resist or completely ignore my requests. On a bad day, I may even get attitude. I don’t live in chores Wonderland.
The second caveat is, as with every parenting advice, your mileage may vary. Different families have different dynamics and different personalities. No parenting advice is a slam-dunk. Ever. You should read this post as a testimony more than a road-map. This is how I get my toilets cleaned once a week with 8 children and no cleaning service.
(Oh, and I was asked to specify that I would be nothing without my husband. I am neither a neat-freak nor a well-organized person. Paul is the list-maker and the task-assigner and the brain-thrust behind that whole chore business. )
Chores come in different brands and flavours. Some must be performed daily, others weekly. In our family, daily chores include pet maintenance, waste management, meals-related chores such as setting the table and emptying the dishwashers. I should also add “baby-chase” which is the chore that befalls the child responsible for following Sarah’s every step and preventing any inspired-by-Sarah chaos. I won’t get into the kind of trouble Sarah gets into, that would be a post in and of itself (and you wouldn’t believe me anyway). I am not including as chores personal hygiene, lunch-making and any other self-serving tasks that the kids have to perform whether they like it or not. I define chores as “family work”: tasks that must be performed for the family or as part of making the family work.
1. The Set-Up: We (meaning Paul but we’re really big on parental unity here so bear with me.) “We” have a list of daily and weekly chores printed and posted where everyone can see it.
Now it’s been there so long that nobody sees it anymore but whenever a child needs a reminder, we refer to the list. We also have a trusted white board that has given me much grief and aggravation at work because once you start working with a white board you just. can’t. stop. I have a really nice white board at work and people visit my office just to write stuff on it. On Saturday morning, we <cough> write down the chores list for the day on the white board.
2. The Assignment: Try to choose chores that match your child’s personality and interests. Much has been written about choosing age-appropriate chores but you can also increase your chances of success by asigning chores wisely. For instance, my oldest daughter has more interest in looking after the animals than her brother. It may not always be possible: computer maintenance and upgrade does not need to happen every week and my son has no natural interest in taking out the trash daily. And yet…
2. The Warm-up: Manage your expectations. Children do not see dirt and chaos like we adults do. If you are only starting to put your children at contribution around the house, you will be disappointed to realize that getting tangible results requires a time investment equal or superior to performing the task yourself, plus some added aggravation and mental strain. You may also be disappointed to realize that children are not born knowing how to sanitize a toilet. “Thorough cleaning” is in the eye of the beholder.
3. The Execution: 3.1 Show them how it’s done. Children are not born knowing how to clean a toilet or operate a washing machine. We often tend to leave children with a chore (clean-up the bathroom) without telling them what it means. If you expect your 12 year-old son to know he must wipe the inside of the toilet seat, you will be sorely disappointed. When I introduce a new chore, I do it once or twice with the children. Then they do it once or twice with me. Then I write it down and post it. Some children don’t need the list, others have fights over it (“It says clean tub before clean sink!!!”; “It doesn’t matter as long as we don’t clean the toilet first!!!”; “We can clean the toilet first if we don’t re-use the rag to clean the sink!” ; “I cleaned the toilet with your toothbrush!!!”) but it does the job.
3.2 Don’t do it for them but make sure they do it. Children are masters of passive resistance. They also have a knack for finding the shortest route between A and B. Add the two, multiply by the number of children and you’ve got yourself doing your children’s chores for them (or dealing with a public health disaster).
3.3 Make them come back to finish it. That’s important so they know you mean it. It seals it for the next time and makes sure there is no erosion of quality over time: kids, especially teenagers, will naturally revert to the path of least resistance. So make sure you apply resistance consistently.
3.4 Nothing happens until the chores are done. This is counter-intuitive for busy women because whether we are a stay-at-home mom or a working-for-a-paycheque mom, we are constantly reminded by advice columns to take time for ourselves and that work won’t run away. But your children need to learn how to work before they can learn how to take a break. This may take more discipline from the parent than the children. Case in point: my daughters needed to go to the shopping centre to pick-up a birthday gift for a birthday party later that day. We warned them that chores had to be finished before we could leave the house. As the morning went by, it became increasingly likely that they would have to go to the birthday party gift-less. Now, do I want to be the mom whose kids show-up at a birthday party empty-handed? No. I really had to sit on my hands that day. But the chores were done and we had time to pick-up a gift.
Family is where children learn work ethics and the value of a job well-done. Chores are one way to get them there.
It’s a 15-passenger van but we don’t use the back bench, making it an 11-passenger van. With a family of 10, it fills-up quite nicely.
Hey Vero 