The Dishwasher and Other Unfun Chores: Aligning Our Expectations with Children's Skills

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Show notes:

Ever wondered how the simple task of unloading a dishwasher could equip your children with essential life skills? We'll unveil how transforming chores into responsibilities can empower your little ones and pave their way to becoming competent adults. 

We'll explore the power of language in molding mindsets, shifting from 'chore' to 'responsibility', and creating a sense of accomplishment in children. This episode is a treasure trove, offering practical tips to help parents navigate the challenging task of inculcating responsibility in kids, all while tackling the dishwasher! 

Our conversation brings to light the art of breaking down overwhelming tasks into smaller, manageable chunks. Remember, it's not just about getting the dishes done; it's about instilling a sense of responsibility and independence. 

We'll share insights on setting realistic expectations, handling pushback from older kids, and the subtle impact of our words. Be ready to turn your everyday household tasks into a learning playground for your children.  Parents, let's roll up our sleeves, get those dishes out, and start building responsibility, one plate at a time!

Transcript: This Transcript has been edited for readability

What's the deal with the dishwasher?

00:00:00] Hello, welcome to Tara's take a podcast about parenting education and life with kids. Today's episode is about the dishwasher. Well, Not exactly the dishwasher. It's about chores, responsibilities and things like the dishwasher. But honestly, I get asked about the dishwasher so often I thought I'd make it the theme of this podcast.

[00:00:21] Whether I'm presenting to a group or in my one-on-one work or on Facebook I'm often asked what is the deal with unloading the dishwasher? Why can't kids do it? And funnily enough, it is a conversation that has happened in my house.

Chore vs Responsibility

[00:00:36] So I'm going to start there. I think a really important part of what I do here, um, in my consulting work is. It is in part because of my amazing husband and the shared parenting journey that we've had. I've said this before him and I come from very different backgrounds, very different upbringings, very different countries and cultures. Um, although I grew up in the middle east, he is from Lebanon. And so we had a really different life experience in terms of where our exposure is, our parenting styles and all the things. Now, one of the things that's so amazing about our dynamic is we have great communication. And as a part of that, sort of, we've been able to work through some things that then I've been able to sort of dig in on a different level. And one of them is the dishwasher. So he is a really strong advocate for building life skills with children. He has a really strong passion.

Building Life Skills With Children

[00:01:30] In our sort of family to ensure that our kids are really confident, capable adults. And that we both sort of perceive or believe that. kids should be able to do a range of things, cooking, cleaning. You know, you know, chores based things. I'm going to be honest. I don't love the word chores. I think it's when you say chore negativity happens.

[00:01:50] I like the word responsibilities because we have responsibilities and not all responsibilities are fun, but they are part of the process. So maybe it's just my own mindset around the two different words, but I just feel like responsibilities speaks to, we got to do this thing. And at the end we can feel a sense of accomplishment.

[00:02:06] Even if that thing was not super fun. Or chore just feels like, oh, you got to do this horrible thing. And it's something you kind of dread. Maybe that's just my take on language, but anyways, one of the things that sort of happen in this journey is my husband will come out and it'd be like, okay, it's time for the kids to do X, Y, Z. They should be supporting you.

[00:02:26] With XYZ I've said before my husband's a chef, so he is not home. Um, a ton. He's got really long hours. And so, but one of the funny things is I'm like, great. How do you expect that to happen? How do you expect X, Y, Z to, to happen? So let's use the dishwasher because this was literally one of our conversations and it's one of the conversations I have a lot.

[00:02:48] Right, it's idea of the okay our eldest needs to start unloading the dishwasher. And I said, okay, who's going to teach him the skill.

[00:02:54] Why does everything have to be a skill? If you've listened to my podcast, you're probably thinking the same thing, Tara, why does everything have to be a skill? Well, everything has to be a skill because. We're doing things differently. We're no longer using threats or bribery or sort of harm, right?

[00:03:09] We're not doing things using punitive measures. That means we are building skills and skill building is a much different process. It is a much longer trajectory. And yes, it does take some teaching. So it's the idea that we, as parents are like mentor guide teachers is really sort of an integral component of modern parenting.

[00:03:34] We can't change the way we do things and not change the way we do things. So those two things don't work. And if you've caught one of my previous episodes, I do talk about this. Kind of more in detail. Um, in my episode about. Um, it'll come to me. Um, And my episode about power struggles, sorry, little brain melt there for a second. So in my episode about power struggles, I dig into this idea, like if you're not using punitive measures, why is this a thing?

Unloading the Dishwasher and Overwhelm

[00:04:02] So let's take the dishwasher. If we're using the dishwasher and we're suddenly going from not doing the dishwasher or doing a few components of the dishwasher and then saying, Hey, unload the dishwasher. That's a large leap. And if you think about it, if you look at the dishwasher, there's a lot of things happening in there. There's cutlery, there's plates, there's glasses. Often they have to go in different places. You need to learn how to unload them in a systematic order so that things can fit where they belong.

[00:04:30] Right. So it actually can be a super overwhelming task. And one of the things that can happen, and again, you've heard me say this a thousand times. It's not intentional. I know it's not intentional, but we kind of wait till kids are a bit older to start getting them to be responsible about things.

Older Children and Un-fun Tasks

[00:04:47] Here's the tricky part. If you are in this zone and you're listening right now and going to be honest with you, it's going to take you a bit longer to get things happening, to get this ball rolling, because they're going to push back a lot because you're asking to do something that they didn't have to do before.

[00:05:01] They're not super excited about it and they have some feelings about it and they're old enough to have some feelings about it.

[00:05:06] So one of the things that you will find is that. If you have an older kid, eight plus seven, plus this process is going to be a bit sort of potentially conflict driven.

Younger Children and Responsibilities 

If you have younger kids. Awesome. Get them started young. The younger you start, my kids were unloading the cutlery at around age three, and then they had their stuff. So they had their plates and things were at their level. And we built it out, but even still there came a stage where like one day the light switch flipped and we're like, okay.

[00:05:38] Our eldest is old enough to reach all the cupboards. So they're old enough to do the whole dishwasher. Except that's a massive mental mind flip from my job is doing the cutlery to my job is now to do the whole thing.

Adult Mind vs Kid Thinking

[00:05:53] It doesn't sound like a big deal in your adult. You're like, what's the big deal. They're tall enough now. The big deal is this small task that we had accepted turned into a massive task that we're not super interested in, and we're not feeling sort of super excited about doing. So how do we do this? We have to think of it as a skill. So if we're not going to like.

[00:06:14] Do the dishwasher without, if you don't, you're not going to have your screen, right. That whole conversation. We have to build it slowly piece by piece. So add layers, break down the components of your dishwasher or your drying rack. This is also applied to a drying rack. In other words, don't go from zero to a thousand and the older your child is this sounds wild I know, the older your child is the more you need to break it down. Because you're actually building a skill that they're not at all interested in doing so young children love to be helpful. They love to be involved. If you get them involved early and you build this process slowly. You know, building it up, you're going to have less pushback.

[00:06:57] You're a bit older. You're going to have pushback. And that's one of the tricky things about building and responsibility and waiting till kids are older to start building the responsibility. They just not fun. And who does like to do unfun things? I don't like doing on fun things.

[00:07:12] I mean, that's a whole other, that's another conversation I have in the works. Is this idea that we have turned childhood into being a requirement to be fun. And we've lost the idea that responsibilities can be fulfilling, that the end products, the clean bathroom, the clean kitchen can be a great feeling. And that's the fun part. But we are so focused on getting kids to do things by making everything fun. I think the responsibility on fun stuff is extra unfun.

[00:07:41] That's a conversation. We're going to put a pin in that one.

Breaking Tasks into Manageable Chunks

[00:07:43] Okay. So we got the dishwasher. And you can think about this for every skill. We got the dishwasher. I'm going to start by layering it out. Maybe first you're going to do cutlery for a week or two. Then you're going to add cups. Then bowls, then the top rack, then the bottom rack, then the top and the bottom rack together. Right. Think of this as I'm not going to do this overnight, I'm going to build this slowly over time. So instead of thinking. Tomorrow, my kids are going to unload the dishwasher. We're going to think in about six weeks. Or maybe two months, we're going to get them to the point where other than a dishwasher.

[00:08:19] In the beginning, it's helpful to help. Do it together and then slowly build other responsibilities and talk about that. K, we're going to work on this together til we build your skills. Eventually, this is going to be one of your family responsibilities.

Summary and Review

[00:08:34] Okay. That was a quick nutshell on like, how do we build skills for responsibility? Where do we put the expectations? I use the example of the dishwasher. We can do this in all kinds of spaces, coming home from school. What are your expectations? Where should they hang things? And how are you breaking it down? Right. You carry your backpack, you hang it up. You carry your backpack, you unload your backpack, you hang it up. Right? What are the steps look like there?

[00:09:00] So when we hear thinking about introducing responsibilities and having responsibilities, How have you broken them down into smaller tasks?

[00:09:09] That we can master until we get to the bigger tasks, because when you present children with an overwhelming responsibility task, They do exactly that they get overwhelmed, they push back and it generally leads to conflict.

[00:09:22] All right. If you have any questions, drop them in the, in the comments, send me an email. I'd love to hear from you.

[00:09:28] taragratto.ca/podcast until next time.