Are you a parent with a few teenagers or maybe 5-6 year children at home? As spring cleaning season approaches us, you might already be planning to involve them in it.
Why shouldn’t you?
It is a great way to learn more about cleaning the house for kids, and it also inspires them to get more organized from such a young age.
But the problem is that many parents have no idea how to involve their children in spring cleaning. But the most necessary thing here is to find out what motivates your children to get them involved in the cleaning. You need to make it fun, as well. Because as you might already know, kids tend to get bored quite easily.
So have you been looking for ways to make it fun to do Spring Cleaning with Kids? We have got you covered right here!
How to Do Spring Cleaning with Kids?
Make them compete with each other
First thing first, stop yelling at your kids. There is no use of yelling or demanding it from them. You are only going to discourage them more from getting involved in it. Because if they are like 6-10 years old, they might not even have a proper idea about spring cleaning meaning and its significance, neither should you expect them to be.
So to make it easier for them, you have to be specific about the works you are going to give them. Just sat something like you need all of the stuff scattered in the room picked up and let see who can pick up the most. See You can make it a game.
And who loves games more than the kids?
Give them a reward
So you have successfully tricked them into competing into each other, and they are doing as much cleaning as they can. But the problem is that kids are brilliant and one of them is going to discover it is a trick you are playing on them. So what do you do?
Well, you can give them small rewards when they finish the cleaning. This way, everyone in the house got involved in this little game, not just the kids. This is the effect of a simple reward can have on the human brain. It doesn’t need to be very expensive.
The trick here is to find a reward that they crave, and also, it is the feeling of being appreciated and being acknowledged going to inspire them.
Count each chore as reward points
I am not saying to spoil them with money or do anything like this. But you know what, money always works like a charm. If you know your son is saving some money for a video game. Kids always have something in mind that they want and It doesn’t necessarily have to be an expensive thing.
It can even be maybe an extra hour to stay up at night or something like that. You can create a chore chart for them where they earn points and when they finish and earn enough points, get them what they want. It makes the process of keeping them involved so much easier.
Make a leaderboard
Keeping a leaderboard can be a fun and yet great way to inspire the kids to be more involved in the spring cleaning. What you can do is have a whiteboard in their room or their kitchen. The key here is to make it visual. It is just another form of making them compete with each other.
But either way, it is quite exciting and also a compelling way to make them participate. Having a leaderboard in front of their eyes will trick their subconscious mind into doing more work. You can also see which of the kids are more active and who is not.
Turn up the music
People always love music. Be it the kids or their parents; everyone else loves music. Maybe you prefer to have much quieter in the house and do not tolerate anything that goes above that level. But if you want to include the kids more into spring cleaning procedure, music can also play a great role in inspiring them.
You can raise it up a little bit and get a little rock and roll going. Or maybe play a record that your kids love or promise them to get a copy of their favorites artist’s records if they promise to participate more.
Give them something they can manage
Getting your kids overwhelmed with work is one of the worst mistakes you can make if you want the kids to get involved in the spring cleaning. Yet it is quite a common mistake that we find the parents make. We understand that spring cleaning is quite a mammoth task, and you are naturally feeling quite overwhelmed.
But does it necessarily mean that you need to burden your children with stress as well? See, they are already not so interested in the cleaning. So if you make them feel like it is a huge task that needs to attend, it is going to put them off even more. So set them with a smaller and more manageable task they will enjoy.
Finally…
If you have been getting frustrated about thinking about how you can make spring cleaning with kids fun and exciting, you have to accept the hard truth. Cleaning is not fun, and it’s not exciting for kids. It never was, and it never will be.
But one thing we’ve learned from psychology is if you reward behavior that is going to be repeated. Can you see what that means?
Promise them some reward, but don’t tell them what right away. Keep some suspense. Also, get to know about what is the secret video game or movie poster your kid wants to buy. Make them surprised by it when they finish their work. Also, don’t forget to make them follow Spring cleaning safety tips as well.
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