by Naima Manal

Created on: March 04, 2009   Last Updated: March 05, 2009

How to manage yourself and your surroundings is the overall lesson and purpose of assigning chores to children. Through daily chores, children learn many technical and organizational skills that carry over into other aspects of their blossoming lives.

The use of chores is by no means a way of relegating adult responsibility to a child. Rather, it is a mild delegation of the duties necessary to run a tidy and efficient home. When a parent chooses child-friendly chores, and they couple that with an explanation of its purpose and its practical demonstration by the parent, the children will know that they are of the age to be a responsible member of the family.

Prior to the assignment of chores, children must observe the parents actively managing these responsibilities themselves. There will be a great lesson lost if the parent burdens the child with a task that they do not do, or that is too difficult for them to handle. By demonstrating how the chore is to be done, and helping your child complete the chores the first few times, the child will feel less burdened by the new task, and may actually like doing the job, just because mom and dad did it with them. This is a way of teaching cooperation and work to your children.

Chores will also help children learn how to organize their time. They will learn to manage their play time and homework time around the responsibilities of the home. Some chores may take longer than others, so they will learn that if they start earlier or work faster, then they will have time for the fun they now have to somewhat cut short.

Chores are a precursor to the full-fledged responsibility of having your own home. Under the parental buffer to the real world, children learn how to do tasks - washing dishes, taking out the garbage, making their beds - much like an apprentice learns as he practically observes the work of his teacher. Children will learn how to take care of themselves, and this learning through chores will make certain essential and necessary tasks second nature to the child. So, chores develop a second-nature of cleaning and being responsible in the child.

This is what parents want for their children - independence through raising and training. Many parents strive very hard to equip their children with the ability to manage their affairs, on every practical level. These parents do not want their children to be incapable of handling responsibility - not knowing how to wash their clothes or fix something simple when it breaks -

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