How to Teach Your Children Cleaning Skills
May 4, 2022
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From your growing toddler to your high school senior getting ready to go to college, it’s important to teach children cleaning skills for life. Although cleaning is a chore, it doesn’t always have to feel like a chore. Keep reading to learn some tips on how to teach your children cleaning skills so they’ll be efficient and have fun along the way.
1. Teaching Young Children How to Clean — Leave the little messes for your little ones. While a newborn won’t be able to vacuum your living room, you can get toddlers and young children involved in the cleaning process. Instill the habit of cleaning the home into them and soon they’ll see it as less of a chore and more of a part of their daily routine. If you have pets at home, they can take on easy tasks like cleaning up pet hair off furniture with a pet hair remover tool. They can refill and clean the dog’s food bowl and water bowl.
2. Encouraging Older Children to Clean — Your angsty preteen or reluctant high schooler is making their way in this world. In between them doing their homework and scrolling through their social media feed, the last thing on their mind is taking out the trash. Still, because they’re under your roof and will be leaving the nest in a blink of an eye, it’s important to encourage your older children to clean around the house, too. You can still make it fun for them like you can with little ones. With any pets in the home, have them take full responsibility for taking care of Fido. Have them feed, walk and bathe them. If your teenager is old enough to drive, they can take them to the vet, too. Both preteens and teenagers can clean up dog or cat fur, too. Get them the best pet hair remover to make it fun and easy for them to get rid of pet hair from clothing, furniture, carpets and more. If they have their own car, they can keep a mini pet hair remover in their car to get rid of any hair (both human and animal!) from their vehicle.
3. Have Them Help You Create a Schedule — Everyone has chores that they may enjoy doing and others that they don’t like at all. Your son may love to do the dishes but hate doing laundry. Your daughter might like cleaning the bathroom but hates raking leaves in the backyard. It’s still important to know how to do a variety of chores around the house, so don’t let one child get stuck with the chores they don’t like all the time. Create a rotating schedule where they can give their input on what chores they’d like to help with each week. If you have an only child, you can switch off with them and you two can go back and forth on the chores every other week.
4. Every Item Has a Home — If your child’s bedroom has toys scattered all over their floor, their bed and nooks and crannies you didn’t know existed, encourage them to remember that every item has a home. Have a designated box for their toys. Don’t let junk drawers fill up with miscellaneous items like old pens and restaurant takeout menus. Children learn by following, so be sure to practice what you preach and organize your own items accordingly.
5. Cleaning in Small Spurts with Micro-Cleaning — According to a survey from Statista, it’s important for at least 64 percent of American households to have a clean home. As for the rest of us, well, sure, it’s nice to have a clean home, but who has the time? You don’t always have to carve out an hour or two to do a deep cleaning of your living room. Sometimes, all you have is five minutes here or literally 30 seconds before you run out the door. Welcome to the concept of micro-cleaning where you can clean in small bursts. Sometimes, it means putting away the washed and dried kitchen utensils back into the drawer in those 30 seconds. Other times, it means spending five minutes cleaning pet hair off your couch or removing lint from your favorite fall sweater with a lint remover.
6. Do Chores Together Daily — This relates back to the family cleaning schedule we talked about earlier, but it’s important to do chores together daily. They don’t need to do big cleaning tasks. They can be small, like having dinner together and then washing and drying the dishes together before you all go to bed. It might mean doing small loads of laundry together like clothes or bed sheets every afternoon after school.
7. Donate and Recycle Together — As your kids grow, they’ll also outgrow clothing that no longer fits or books they no longer need. Get together as a family and take inventory of any clothing, books and miscellaneous items that no one has used in years. Decide which ones you can discard immediately, which ones you’ll donate and which ones you can repurpose or recycle.