We have taught our children to do the chores around the house as a part of their responsibilities – God has given us a home, toys, and other possessions – we need to look after them. We don’t pay them to maintain their responsibilities. The other aspect of doing chores is that it is a family thing – team building, family identity thing – we all do chores of some sort, we do them together and we help each other.

We also understand that our children need to learn to manage money as well – it is another thing God has given us and we need to use it and manage it wisely. Now that our children are older, and they have the ability to do household chores well we have “Work Day for Pay” most Tuesday afternoons. This is a time that the children do extra chores for me and I pay them. They need to be able to do the chore to the standard that I would be happy to pay anyone else to do it. This means I should be happy to let them go to someone else’s house and get paid to do these chores as well – that is the standard they need to be working at before they get paid here in our house.

One of the trickiest things as a parent with chores and children is not relying on the older ones all the time and giving the younger ones a go at learning the things that the older ones have mastered so well. It is much easier to let the older ones keep on doing it – it inconvenient to have to start training another child! But it needs to happen if we are to train each of our children.

One way I have made that happen is when a younger child is ready for a new skill (generally one that an older is already doing) I look for a new skill for the older one too – so they all bump up to a new skill.

This year Jess is taking on office work, leaving the housework to Nomi and Daniel.

Josh is working outside of the home for a local business maintaining their commercial property and manager’s home lawn. He helps out on the farm when Pete needs him to, and is supervising Daniel as he takes over the mowing of our lawn.

Jess is learning to do our book-keeping using Quickbooks. The goal is for her to manage Peter’s business mail, banking and invoicing. She will also do some bookwork for me. 2 hours a week (though we don’t know how much time she’ll need to completely do these tasks). We are just starting out, she is in training (though we are actually paying her through this training, which wasn’t the case with housework chores). Jess has picked up the few paid jobs around town, including babysitting, but her heart is to help out in the family (at this stage anyway).

Nomi loves ironing. So she often catches me up with the ironing. She can do most cleaning tasks such as scrub the shower, dust high cupboards and ceiling fans as well. I get her to do whatever is most pressing for the week.

Daniel washes the car and is in training for cleaning windows and showers. Joshua is supervising Daniel mowing the lawn here at home though he is able to do it by himself.

We don’t pay our children big bucks – their wages increase as they get older. This is mainly because their needs aren’t high and the value of money is developed on the needs. If they have a lot of money and no real needs then money is cheap. So we keep in balance their earnings with their needs for money.

How do you teach these things?