Toddlers and Chores: How To Get Started?

Teaching toddlers responsibility through chores is great, but when and how is the best way to start?

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UPDATE: Check out my reward blog article to see our latest update and attempt. 🙂

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Okay, I’m looking for some advice, please! I’ll begin by saying when it comes to kids and chores, I don’t think there is any “right” or “wrong” way; it’s a matter of what works for you and your family, and we can all learn from each other! 

My son is three and lately, my husband and I have been trying to decide what kind of chore chart, if any, we want to implement. I feel chores are an excellent way to teach kids about responsibility, work ethic, and other essential life skills; not to mention it can help reduce mommy stress. 😉 Currently, my son’s regular chores consist of feeding our two dogs and cleaning his room. He also, occasionally, helps my husband with the dishes, but that isn’t a task that he is expected to do.

Right now it’s more about the concept and making chores a family affair, I don’t expect his results to be perfect; which means there needs to be a willingness to just go with it sometimes. 

Eventually, we want to incorporate some sort of allowance system into the mix, although I’m of the mind that money for chores should be for extra tasks a child takes on to make some money (and learn about money), not things that he should be doing anyway, like cleaning his room and brushing his teeth. I know people who pay their teenagers $5 to brush their teeth, I mean, you do you, but, really? 

But I digress…

Right now, our rough idea is to set up a chart with three simple chores (feed dogs, clean room, help with dishes), and when my son completes one he gets a checkmark or a sticker.  Something simple and clear for a three-year-old to understand.

If by the end of the week he has cleaned his room every day (since that is an expectation of his personal responsibility) and has a certain amount of extras (the feeding pups and washing dishes) completed, then he would get to pick a “treasure” out of a treasure box or we could go somewhere fun…something like that. 

Eventually, the chore chart would expand to include more age-appropriate chores like assisting with laundry, dusting, and so on, and we would assign different monetary amounts to the ones that weren’t part of his regular tasks. My husband and I want to do this mainly to teach my son about money and how it works; I feel it’s an important skill to learn, and the sooner the better. (But that’s a blog for another day). We do know we want to let him pick out a bank before we start to help get him excited and invested (no pun intended) in the process…all in good time.

Again, none of this is officially in place, yet, aside from my son getting into the routine of doing the actual tasks (and getting better at them every day). We are in the beginning stages of trying to figure out what we want to do and how we want to set up a system. I want to make sure that we have it clear in our heads before we start anything because I don’t want to end up changing it around on my son a bunch of times and confuse him. 

I’ll update here as we put things in place, but for now…please share your ideas! Have you implemented a chore system with your kids? 

When did you start giving your kids an allowance? Or do you not give your kids an allowance? 

Interested to hear what everyone has to say! Thanks! 🙂