My husband and I were always the ones cleaning the kitchen. Nothing worked to get the kids to do their kitchen chores and I complained! Then my 10-year old son made a suggestion and we had the MACEN kitchen crew! It lasted for years and worked with no complaining on my part.
So what is the MACEN kitchen crew and how does it work? As a family we discussed the seemingly endless dirty dishes that piled up in the kitchen and we had a dishwasher! But it was always full of clean dishes. Assigning the loading and unloading to separate people didn't work. So as suggested by the 10 year old, we went to a weekly schedule with only one person responsible for the whole kitchen during that week. We determined that the work week began on Sunday and we marked their first initial on the calendar that hung in the kitchen....MACEN was how it turned out. We set up the schedule for the year. Now in our family of five that meant that each of us only had kitchen duty once every 5 weeks! The chores were loading and unloading the dishwasher, wiping the counters, and a weekly mopping of the floor. Interestingly, if one of the kids slacked off, it was their sibling that got on their case about not having a clean bowl for cereal, which worked much better than Mom complaining! When one of the kids was going to be gone for part of a week, they would swap weeks with someone else so the plan was smooth.
This one idea was extremely successful. Did I mention that I was finally freed up from kitchen cleaning duty for a month at a time?! As the kids grew up and left home we adjusted the plan down to the number in the house until it was just my husband and myself again.

Learn more about this author, Mary Ellen Burley.
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