Chore planning upfront will help you succeed in the future

Chore planning is easier if you break the day into at least three, but ideally four or five time periods. This allows you to narrow down what works for your household best each day.

You want your child to remember to brush his teeth once in the morning and once in the evening, not twice just before bed! Splitting up the day like this in the chore chart will prevent that kind of “letter of the law but not the spirit” obedience.

Keep in mind that this is for chores and tasks you want your child to do each day. If you think of some chores that are more like weekly chores, jot those down in another column labeled “Extra” or “Weekly Chores” and you will allocate time for them differently.

Morning Chores and Tasks

From the time your child is getting out of bed until school time (home school or other) or other activities (family, church, etc.) For most this runs between the hours of 6:30 and 8:00, depending on your family situation.List of ideas.

Mid-day (or Noon time) Chores and Tasks

After morning school or other activities, generally this could be considered “Lunch time” for practical purposes.Generally runs between 11:30 to 1:00 depending upon your household scheduleList of ideas

After School Chores and Tasks

After the day’s schooling and activities, this period generally runs between 3:00 and 5:00 depending upon your household scheduleList of ideas

Evening Chores and Tasks

After dinner, generally between the hours of 6:00 and 8:00 depending upon your situation and when your children go to bed. These chores will include anything you want them to do at night, including the tasks they need to accomplish that preparing them for bed.List of ideas

Extra Chores and Tasks

This is an important category of chores. There are several things that are done each week, but cannot (or should not) be tracked each day for each child. This becomes your “catch-all” for chores that are generally only weekend chores or that are more involved, or are alternated between children each week or month.List of ideas

Don’t lose this master list!

Keep this master list somewhere so that you can find it (on the computer or on a notepad or somewhere).You will change and adapt and grow your list of chores over time and it is easier to add to a list that you’ve already started than it is to start anew every time you need to adjust or adapt the system.

The chores that you actually implement will probably be a subset of this master list (at least initially).

Put it to the reality test

Walk yourself through your day and ask yourself “Does this make sense?” Only you can determine whether it does or not.

Start Small, Gain Success.

Start with a few chores and build over time. Then you have an idea of how closely your reality will meet up with your expectations. My best advice is to start small, gain success and encourage your child, and then progress by adding a new chore every couple of weeks.