Best Practices for Chores and Allowances

With our butterfly family, I love getting our children to help with chores. Teaching them to assist with keeping their room and the house clean helps them become more responsible, take pride in their work, and even to preserve when something is a little more difficult. Plus, when they put their mind to it, my children often use their critical thinking, problem solving and creativity to try and make the tasks easier and more fun. These are all necessary life skills needed to survive and succeed in today’s world. But how much to pay your child for chores?

Chores For Children

Children are amazing mess makers, but they can be just as incredible as helping clean up messes too. Wherever you are able, encourage your children to help you with chores around the house.

Who Helps

We expect all our children to help with the household chores. It’s part of their routine and helps keep us all motivated when we all work together. They are responsible for their bedrooms, but also help with everyday tasks like dishes, laundry, setting and wiping down the tables, putting away toys and the like. As they grow, they can help with move and move.

Our room cleaning checklist is super easy to use every day with your children. We ask children to focus on 6 areas of their room to keep it clean. We paired each chore with a simple picture so that our children could be more independent with cleaning their own rooms. Print your copy and encourage your children to help keep their room clean too.

But always remember, they are still learning so they might need a hand with some of the chores or they may need to be redone completely. Even our really little ones love to help. It might be helping to hand you dishes to put away or putting their toys in a toy bin, but encourage them where you can. The more they help in the beginning, the more likely they will help as they grow.

What Can Children Clean?

Children can clean just about anything in the house that needs daily cleaning. They can help with most chores that are done weekly and are great helpers with the most seasonal clean tasks too! While your toddler and preschooler may need to be more of a helper when it comes to chores, by kindergarten age, most children can tackle more chores independently. So many people love to break down chores by ages, but we find that the age a child can tackle a chore really depends on your child.

Since every child is different, you will need to think about what you child can do. Once you have a list of chores your child can tackle, you will need to teach them how. We have found that by kindergarten, most children are capable of learning the various chores around the home. However, they may not become proficient at a chore for a few months or a year or two. That doesn’t mean you don’t ask your child to try. They can try and then you can show them how to do it better.

We give each of our children a daily chore to complete. For us, the daily chores are the dining room table, the dishes, and the floor. These are things that need to be cleaned daily, sometimes 2 – 3 times a day to keep our house clean. Then we set weekly chores for our children.

Weekly Chores for Children

Our weekly chores list are chores we have found that our children, once they reach kindergarten, are pretty capable of doing with minimal support. Chores like dishes and cleaning bathrooms take a little more time, but everyone can still help. Your younger children might help by picking up the floor, cleaning up bathtub toys, or putting away the silverware. We paired each chore with a picture to make this super easy for children.

Just print a copy, put it into a page protector, and hang it on the refrigerator. This makes it easy for your children to reference when working on chores. We prefer to leave the chores unassigned as everyone likes a little variety and this takes in the flexibility of children’s busy schedules. When one child has a busy week, they can focus on different chores that can be done more quickly or the night before.

Your chores might need to look different than ours. Instead of brainstorming chores, think about areas in your house that get messy. Then make a list of the areas that drive you crazy and the chores that need to be done to clean that area. These quickly become your children’s weekly or daily chores.

Cleaning Supplies for Children

We have changed out most of our cleaning supplies for more child friendly supplies. We switched over to Shaklee Basic H and Basic G cleaners as these are more child friendly and still do the job. In addition, we bought a steam cleaner since it uses water to clean. Our children love using it and the powerful benefits are obvious to their little eyes.

We set up our cleaning supplies in easy to use spray bottles. Our spray bottles are colored for ease of knowing which spray does each chore. Teach your children which type of cleaner to use for each chore. If you want, you could even write it on their chore list. Then make a basket of cleaning rags or towels. Our children know which towels they can use while cleaning and even where to find them. Afterwards, they can put the towels into the laundry for washing. We find this the simplest and cheapest method for having kids help with cleaning.

Allowance

Yet, the question always seems to come into play about an allowance. An allowance can be a great way to help the children see the connection between work and pay. In addition, children learn a little financial savvy along the way. Yet, we don’t want to teach children that they only need to help out around the house to earn money. Most adults need to clean their own home without making additional money for the job. It’s a fine line to really help your little ones grow into successful butterflies.

How Much to Pay your Child for Chores?

If you do plan to offer your children an allowance, be mindful of the amount that you are offering your children. I hear many stories of kids getting $5 a chore or earning $20 for keeping their room clean a day. And we all know that children compare with their friends these days. It’s important to be realistic so as to set your little ones up for success when they grow.

In our society, what is a realistic hourly wage? If something takes me 1 minute to clean, should my children earn $5 for that chore? If they do, they would be earning an hourly wage of $300!! Even at a $1 a chore, that’s an hourly wage of $60! Still seems a bit excessive. And even if the chore takes your child 5 minutes to complete it, that’s $12 an hour. This is a little more reasonable. No wonder we have some many young adults who are struggling to keep a steady job.

Why Pay Less Per Chore than You Think?

I like to think about how long a chore would take to complete to decide on the monetary value of each chore. Even a chore that takes 2 minutes to complete would offer an hourly wage of $30 if children earned $1 per chore. I want my children to learn the value of money, that they earn money by working hard, and practice their value life skills, but I definitely don’t want them to be able to earn so much money by doing chores that later in life they think that they can make enough money doing just a little.

So, with our children, most chores earn them between $0.25 – $0.50. Even these chore prices average out to an hourly wage of $15 -$20 an hour which is still a bit high for children. However, we tie their chore earnings to pay for their after school and extracurricular activities. If they want to pay soccer, they need to earn the fee for the soccer league. They also cover the cost of their materials. You grew and need new dance shoes, that comes out of your allowance. Depending on the expenses, we work with our children to keep the money they need to earn responsible.

Skills to Teach with Allowance

Start with keeping tracking of their money. Not only do they need a balance ledger to keep track of their money earned and debits, but this also helps them to set goals. If they know that they want to play basketball soon, they can take the cost of basketball and divide it up into weekly and daily earning amounts. If they know that they want to go to a special scout sleepover, they can calculate the additional money they need to earn to be able to afford the sleepover. Not only are they setting goals, but they need to figure out a plan to make the goal achievable.

As they are still learning and growing, we do allow them to opportunity to take a “loan” or have a negative balance. This allows them to afford their fun activities and hopefully begin to figure out their mistakes so that they can correct them. Plus it gives us the chance to talk about credit, interest, and loans. We don’t actually charge any interest yet, but its a great conversation to begin to have.

We do draw the line at any additional purchases when they are negative though. So if they have a negative balance and want to go to a movie with friends, sorry. The little things really help them to learn to correct their mistakes and look for creative solutions. There are different apps to help you to manage this with your children.

Mindset for Parents About Chores

As a parent, there are a few things we should keep in mind. Our children are learning and just like they needed to learn to dress themselves, walk, and use the potty, they will need to learn how to do chores. As parents we need to remember this and guide our children through this learning period.

Expect Mistakes

Your children will need time to learn how to do each new chore that you assign. As they are learning, expect them to make mistakes. These mistakes are typically easy to fix, but on occasion they may break something. This is all part of the learning curve. So if a dish gets broken, the dishwasher needs repair, or a spray bottle loses its top, remember it’s not the end of the world. Taking the time (and money) to teach these chores now will help you as your children grow.

They may also think they are cleaning, when in fact they are stashing toys or garbage where it doesn’t go. Children will try to do things as quickly as they can with as little work as possible. Keep an eye out for this behavior and teach them what to do instead. Show them how this actually wastes their time more than just putting things away correctly.

More Positives than Corrections

When your children make mistakes, and they will make mistakes, take the time to correct them. But please remember to offer positives too. Your children are learning something new and need that positive reassurance to keeping trying. I’m not sure there are many people who genuinely likes chores, but when paired with constantly negative or correcting comments, that makes it even less enjoyable.

Praise you can give your children. You can compliment them on getting started on their chore. Remind them that you know this is difficult, but look at how much better they have gotten. Show them how much quicker they can do the chore now. Compliment one area where they did well. Praise how they gathered all the correct supplies or even how they put away the supplies. These little words of encouragement go a long way!

Fix what they Miss

When both you and your child have the time, show them what they could do to improve their chore. Maybe the forgot about the dishes on the counter, missed a spot when wiping down the table, or need to sweep under the counters. Point out areas that they did well and then show them the area that needs a little more work. Sometimes they figure it out with just the reminder, other times they need you to show them what to do. So take a moment and teach them, but remember, you might need to teach them multiple times.

Other times, it can be quicker for you to just fix what your child missed. Wash the few dishes they left out, scrub the corner of the table, pick up the toy still on the floor, or even vacuum the rug again. This is perfectly fine too. Sometimes time is more important than teaching your child how to do the chore better.

Show them how to do it better

As the adult, you probably have lots of little times for doing chores around the house. Try not to overwhelm your children with these all at once. Instead, show them a tip or two every few days to help them become better at the chores. This might be the best way to hold the broom, what to do when the table has stuck on food, how to load the plates in the dishwasher, how to fold a blanket, etc. As you show them the chore, try to get down to their level or have them help you do it correctly.

The best way to know what you child needs to learn is to watch them doing their chores. By observing, you will see what they still need to work on and where they can continue to improve. You can even have your older children teach your young children some tips for specific chores. Sometimes they understand this even better.

Teach efficiency

Be sure to teach your child how to complete their chores the fastest and most efficient way possible. Children often go about doing things the long way because they just don’t know better. Just like when we first learn math, children may solve problems without using the mathematical algorithms. With practice, they move towards the more standard algorithm.

Children need this practice with chores too. The more they do a specific chore, the faster they will become. But there are always ways to get better and this is where parents come in. Show them the faster way to load the dishwasher or clean the table. You might even need to teach them to pick up more than one toy at a time.

Final Thoughts on How Much you Should Pay your Child for Chores?

There is no right answer for chores and allowance. The right answer will be different for each family. Many experts suggest a weekly allowance of $0.50 – $1 per age. For my 5 year old, this would work perfectly to cover his extra curricular activities. Yet, my 9 year old would not be able to afford her dance classes.

You may even need to differentiate your plan based on your different children as well. Not all children are the same and thus each one might need something a little different. What is important is that you find a system for you and what works for your family. And always remember to reevaluate because change is a constant and children are always changing.

Learn more about our chores routines both daily and weekly. Be sure to check out our favorite math cleaning up trick that not only motivates our children to clean but also helps them develop math fluency.

Hi, I’m Nicole.

Here at Creatingbutterflies we provide families with practical solutions to real life problems for everything parenting, scouting, dual language, and enjoying time outdoors. We are a family of 6 with 4 wonderful becoming bilingual children who loves scouting, camping, and hiking with their family. Mom is an educator and dad is a firefighter/paramedic.