Excellent Articles About Teaching Kids to Work

I'm on a push right now to continue to motivate my kids to become professional happy helpers. The goal is that they will eventually be self-motivated to work and help out around the house. This means tuning into their work habits and putting in the time to teach and train them. I was just realizing that though they are usually enthusiastic helpers, there is so much more they could be doing and their initiative has a lot of room to grow. As the kids were growing up I made the mistake of cleaning up after them a lot because it was the quickest thing to do. Ok, so it's never too late and I have decided that I will take the time to teach my kiddos the right way to work no matter how long it takes! Teaching a kid the correct way to clean is often quite time consuming--but it is well worth the effort! Tonight, as I was tucking my kids in bed, I asked Kyle, my five year-old, what the highlight of his day was. He smiled really big and then told me, "when I was working in the yard with daddy."

I found a BLOG yesterday which I thought was interesting. I didn't have time to do much more than skim over the posts and I liked what I saw. The BLOG's called "The Lazy Organizer" but this full-time mom is definitely not lazy! Anway, she wrote some good articles about teaching kids to work. I read the first two and was able to glean some tips. Here are the links to the series of articles for you to check out:

Part I, Whose Job is It?
Part II, Getting Rid of the Clutter
Part III, Let Them Help
Part IV, It Takes Time
Part V, Work Together
Part VI, Learn to Practice
Part VII, Make it Easy