My home dynamic will be changing soon. It will be me, my girlfriend and our combined children, six of them, ages 5-10. Three boys, three girls and a room for each set of three.
Im working on equal division of chores. Rotating common rooms and tasks among the six of them shouldn’t be too difficult. Then I get to sleeping quarters. I need to rotate three children on each room to be fair. The week(and my proposed chore chart) has seven days. How do i devide and track the cleaning of each room fairly? Rotating is fine, but hard to track on a seven day chart.
We’re trying to get house rules and chore allocations lined out before my four arrive. Things should get interesting but our primary goal is to prevent our own favoritism and bias.
Excuding the master BR/BA there are:
Two living areas, one large one small
Two bedrooms, roughly eaqual size
Laundry room
Kitchen, small
Dining room, smallish, adjacent kitchen
Hallway
Bathroom
Front and back yards
Do I do a 30 day chart? Some kind of color coding? I’ve got a week left and I’m starting to sweat.
Forget a roster. Write down all the tasks on cards, trying to make them equal (or allocate each task ‘points’ and give kids a point quota). Get the kids to pick their own tasks. Stick 'em up on a board, then everyone knows what they’re responsible for all the time.
If certain tasks are more popular than others, redistribute every few weeks, letting a different person be first picker each time.
This is basically what we have, except that we have fewer things on our potential chores list because we have low housework standards
FWIW, we’ve never tried to discriminate light/heavy tasks on age, they just all do stuff. Kids seem to have gravitated to tasks they like, and the board rarely changes. Seems to work fine.
Definitely incorporate a means to rotate everyone among all chores - that way, all of the kids will learn how to do everything eventually. I look at chores as a means to prepare kids to live on their own one day while making them responsible members of the household while they’re young.
My mom set the chores in our house, and it was definitely set up as Boy Chores and Girl Chores. I was born in '54, so there was still such a thing, and I was endlessly pissed that by bro got the cool chore of shoveling the snow while I got the crappy job of scrubbing the bathtub. To this day, I hate scrubbing the tub.
