A friend asked me recently who of the boys is the best at doing chores. I guess my definition of “best” would be “does what I ask without too much fussing” plus “does a really good job,” in which case I wouldn’t say that any of the boys rises to the top as consistently doing both, but they all basically do a fine job.
I should also clarify that I don’t really assign regular chores. Here, it’s mostly a “this needs doing, and I’m telling you to do it” situation. The older boys are the ones we ask to do more heavy-lifting kinds of things and I try to play to their strengths. One of them kind of likes vacuuming, so he’s usually the one I ask to do that. I rotate between the older ones for washing and drying dishes. The big boys shovel for a neighbor, so the middle boys do the shoveling for our house. Taller boys are asked to bring the garbage cans up from the street after garbage pick-up; the strongest boys are asked to carry heavy things upstairs or downstairs. The younger boys are asked to do different things: pick up all the Legos off the floor and put them back in their bin; put all the toys back in the closet; find all the dirty socks in the house and put them by the washer machine. And of course, there are the things they all need to do: put their clothes away, rake the yard, bring in groceries from the van.
All that said, there is something that they all regularly amaze me with: they all seem to really enjoy participating in what they call “a deep clean,” and deep cleans are often done spontaneously by them, without me asking them to!
For example, I’ve been watching my eight-year-old grow into the kind of boy who seems to enjoy spending his time deep cleaning certain areas of the house. Over the past few months, he has happily spent an hour or two in the front room and entryway, all on his own, getting things straightened up, throwing out garbage, sweeping up dirt and crumbs. He’s done the same in the toy closet, which is a large walk-in closet with four large shelves whose contents are usually all over the floor of the closet and spilling into the room. And I regularly find him cleaning and rearranging his desk. He inspires me!
It can’t go unmentioned that the original spontaneous deep cleaner in our house was our oldest — before he was old enough to work, he would make a summer project out of deep cleaning certain areas of the house. He set a great example for his younger brothers, not only the eight-year-old, but the others as well. My twelve-year-old has said to me several times recently that when school gets out for Christmas break, he wants us all to spend the first couple days cleaning the house so that it’s nice for Christmas, and when he says he wants “us all” to do it, he’s totally including himself. Others of the boys have chimed in, agreeing — they all want a clean house for Christmas and don’t mind doing what needs to be done in the forty-eight hours leading up to it to make it happen. They’ve said similar things before Thanksgiving and Easter for the past couple of years, and I can see that we’ve fallen into a nice every-few-months team-deep-clean. Every time we do, we all sit around happily in our clean spaces, enjoying the tranquility before life messes the house
up again.
I myself prefer to do almost anything else to cleaning — I’m happy to take care of my family in all other ways (cooking, chauffeuring, doing laundry, grocery shopping, meal planning, working, taking care of sick people, helping with homework, reading to children, meeting with teachers, handling doctor appointments, etc., etc., etc.) — so I’m extra grateful for children who mostly do what I ask them to do chore-wise with a basic semblance of acceptability, and I feel completely undeserving of children that choose to spend free time and vacation time helping me get the house in order at an even deeper level. I love the feeling of “we’re all in this together” that working on the house this way creates.
So if any children or young adults are reading this, consider cleaning your house for your parents as a Christmas present — if they’re anything like me, they’ll be thrilled! I hope you all have a wonderful holiday season!
Kate and her husband have seven sons ages 18, 16, 14, 12, 10, 8, and 4. Email her at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..
