It is important to encourage your children (both the children and teenagers) to help at home. Helping at home gives them a sense of responsibility, self-sufficiency, time-management, prioritisation, and gives them a sense of pride.
Take these points to hand when you are encouraging your teenage children to help out at home.
- Decide the chores that need to be done and design a roster; this makes them feel that helping at home is the responsibility of everyone in the family.
- Make it clear that cleaning their room is their responsibility.
- Encourage your child to help at home when they are young; this makes it part of their daily routine and is not a novelty later on.
- Do not make these chores feel like a punishment.
- Have conditions associated with the chores, like withholding trips to the mall or their pocket money if they fail to participate. This way they learn responsibility.
When you are busy and stressed it may feel that it is easier to simply do all the work yourself. But by involving your children to help at home you teach them responsibility competence, and self-sufficiency.