With kids coming home for summer, how can we keep our homes from getting out of hand? Mix things up! Tidy tasks is a phrase that I use to encompass all sorts of fun, easy and novel ideas for keeping kids motivated to help keep our house looking nice.

With a house full of children, keeping things fun is one key for keeping things successful at the same time. We pick ideas that sound like they might help get the job done while keeping levity at the same time. Who likes to do chores anyway? Most kids don’t. Take kids with behavior problems, emotional disorders, or just tough backgrounds, and reality says that chores are just not going to get done if we don’t have some tricks and tools to use.

At the same time, with a houseful of kids that have “issues”, many of them have special needs here as well. For instance, many of my children have FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) or FAE (fetal alcohol effects). One thing that their brains often lack is the ability to retain information. This comes into play, for example, with my Marie when she was 6. Her chore was to sweep the entryway. She could not remember where it was from day to day. She was willing to sweep, but unable to remember. Every day, we would tell her where it was and she did her job. After many, many days, she remembered on her own where the entry way was. The key to helping unlock this confusion for a child with FAS is repetition. If things are the same way, over and over, eventually (hopefully, not always though), they will remember how to do something.

Sometimes that is the tricky part, keeping things novel and fun - but at the same time, keeping an activity/idea long enough, repetitive enough and consistent enough that the FAS (fetal alcohol syndrome) brains can wrap themselves around it.

Here are a couple of fun ideas that are working for us right now:

1) Box o’ Socks: Place a box in a central area. (We use a laundry basket). This is a box that will move from room to room as we clean to throw things in that don't belong until they get to where they do belong. We call ours the "box o' socks" - because socks are usually a good percentage of what's in the box! Even though the box contains items other than socks, the rhyme factor is big for keeping the cleaning factor fun. I’ve heard other homes that do something similar, calling it the Lost and Found.

2) Stop, Drop and Clean: We just started using something that I call: "stop, drop, and clean" (from stop, drop, and roll) -

Mom or dad yells out "stop, drop and clean", as needed, at different times during the day.
The child stops what they’re doing, drops things right there (literally if they feel a need or it seems funny) and do a quick tidy of the room or area they’re in.

This is separate from a daily chore and should take only seconds or less than 2minutes at most.

After a quick tidy, resume activity and proceed with day. So far, novelty alone is keeping this something that even the teens don't balk at.

Look for more “Tidy Task” ideas in future blogs!

Other blogs for more ideas:
Routines
Chores - How Does it Work for You