Take Turns Mopping Floors

Teaching kids about responsibility inside of your home is often difficult. While you understand what must be done and how to do it, you have two challenges to overcome with your kids. First, you must teach them the correct way to complete the task. Second, and usually more difficult, you must convince them to actually complete the task in a satisfactory manner.

Most kids will do anything to get out of doing chores around the house. Whether they decide to whine and scream, or just make excuses about being too tired or wanting to do it later, kids will try to avoid a lot of work that must be done around the house. And once your child agrees to take on the task, often they’re in such a rush to get it done that it only gets done halfway right.

While avoidance of chores around the house may not be that big a deal for some of the smaller tasks (for example, kids cleaning up their room), it can be a bigger problem in chores that need to be done in order to keep bugs and rodents out of the home (for example, cleaning floors and bathrooms).

Until fairly recently, my wife has been doing most of the cleaning of floors. I’d do a pretty poor job in helping to keep the floors clean myself (I’m a decent sweeper, but not so much a mopper), but the kids didn’t really help a lot. My wife is pretty particular around how she wants the floors clean, and so a lot of times she’d end up redoing it because she didn’t like how I did it.

However, we’ve decided that we want to teach our kids about how to clean and mop the floors. In order to accomplish this, without my wife redoing the floors every week, has been to take turns as to who mops the floor. One week my wife will clean the floors, the next week our son will clean the floor, followed by my wife the next week. I’ll then mop the floors the week after that.

This routine has had several great benefits for everyone involved. First, by taking turns on mopping the floors, everyone involved is responsible for making sure that they’re responsible for the messes that are being made. It forces everyone in the home to be a little more careful and responsible for our actions. If we drop something on the floor, we’re a little quicker to clean it up immediately.

Furthermore, my wife is no longer mopping the floor every single week. This frees up a little bit more of her time in order to do some of the other things that she wants. While keeping the house clean is important to her, it’s not her favorite thing to do either. She’d much rather be enjoying some of her favorite hobbies.

Finally, because my wife is so particular about how the floor is cleaned, she’s able to make sure that things are cleaned how she likes them every other week. While the floor may not be perfect each week (and she’s happy to give pointers to us), she’s able to get it exactly how she wants it on a regular basis.

Our kids have taken pretty well to mopping floors. It helps that they only have to clean them once a month (once every 4 weeks). It’s fun for them to be able to get the floor wet (and clean) and they generally look forward to it since it’s not something we force them to do every week.

If you need an idea on how to teach kids how to complete a certain task around the home, work on taking turns with them every other week to complete the task. If you have more than one kid, move the tasks between them so that everyone gets an opportunity to be responsible. Make sure they see you complete the task as well so that they understand how to complete it as well.