On Youth and Teens Today with Vanessa Van Petten

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1. Use the Web
• Chorewars.com - Yes, someone has turned chores into a videogame. If you have kids that really cannot keep focus, this will help.
• Mozilla Sunbird- an amazing way to keep track of all scheduled maintenance things in your house. It is a really easy (and free) way to manage Weekly, daily and yearly chores and tasks
• ChoreBuster - Another easy and free website to manage the chores online—and as they stress a very fair way to delegate household jobs.
• Payjr - Same kind of site, another name.

2. Make an old fashioned Chore Board
If you don’t want to use the web. Make a big Board that you can post in a central location in your house. Sit everyone down and talk about a fair and easy way to assign everyone chores. Write it down on the schedule and have people check them off when they do them.

3. Make a rewards system
As mentioned in the previous post. Make allowance dependent on chore completion. If your child starts with $5 per week, when they complete a chore add on 25 cents. If everything on the board is checked off (and actually completed) then they get to choose what is for dinner on Sunday—anything as long as it can be looked forward to.

4. Keep it permanent
Do not keep changing around who does what and when. This is confusing and is
just asking for people to forget.

5. Be consistent
I have helped families implement these chore boards or set-up a online account at chorebuster and the family did great for about three weeks. At about the fourth week, the someone forgets to mow the lawn because of a birthday party or a houseguest is in town so the sheets do not get changed. Occasional changes or day switches or fine—but they have to be occasional, and ‘I forgots’ and ‘slip-ups’ have to be immediately remedied. If you let it continue, the whole system will crash and in two months the house will be filthy, the yelling will be rampant and nothing will be getting done.

Do you need a family manager?