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!
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------ The music for this podcast is written and produced by Jazlyn B with the guidance of Sabine Ndalamba Note:This podcast is created for educational purposes only. Any references links, resources or content are not intended as a substitute for medical or professional mental health advice.
Tara Gratto:
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 would make it the theme of this podcast. 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, so I'm going to start there. I think a really important part of what I do here in my consulting work 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 up-breath, very different countries and cultures. Although I grew up in the Middle East, he is from Lebanon, and so we had a really different experience in terms of where our exposures, 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, we've been able to work through some things that then I've been able to 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 in our sort of family to ensure that our kids are really competent, capable adults and that we both sort of perceive or believe that kids should be able to do a range of things cooking, cleaning, chores-based things. I'm going to be honest, I don't love the word chores. I think it's another thing. You say chore. Negativity happens. 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, 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 happened in this journey is my husband will come out and it'll be like okay, it's time for the kids to do XYZ. They should be supporting you with XYZ. I've said before, my husband's a chef, so he is not home 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 XYZ to happen? So let's use the dishwasher, because this was literally one of our conversations at a start conversation. I have a lot right. So the idea of the cake our eldest needs to start unloading the dishwasher. And they said, okay, who's going to teach him the skill? Why does everything have to be a skill? And if you've been listening 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, 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 parents. 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 caught one of my previous episodes, I do talk about this kind of more in detail in my episode about it'll come to me in my episode about power struggles. Sorry, it'll 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? 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 composes of the dishwasher, 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 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. Here's the tricky part. If you are in this zone and you're listening right now. I'm gonna be honest with you it's gonna take you a bit longer to get things happening, to get this ball rolling, because they're gonna push back a lot Cause you're asking to do something that they didn't have to do before. Then. I'm super excited about it and they have some feelings about it and they're old enough to have some feelings about it. So one of the things that you will find is that if you have an older kid eight plus, seven plus this process is gonna be a bit sort of potentially conflict driven. 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, their K-Masage were like one day the light switch flipped and we're like okay, our eldest is old enough to reach all the covers, so they're old enough to do the whole dishwasher. Except that's a massive mental mind slip from. My job is doing the cutlery too. My job is now to do the whole thing. It doesn't sound like a big deal when you're at all. You're like what's the big deal? They're tall enough. Now the big deal is the small task that we had accepted turned into a massive task that we're not super interested in and not feeling sort of super excited about doing. So how do we do this? We have to think about it as a skill. So if we're not gonna like, do the dishwasher, if you don't, you're not gonna 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. You get them involved early and you build this process slowly, building it up. You're gonna have less pushback. You're a bit older, you're gonna have pushback, and that's one of the tricky things about building in responsibility and waiting until kids are older to start building their responsibility. Just stop fun. And who does like to do unfun things? I don't like doing unfun things. 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 product 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. That's a conversation we're gonna put a pin in that one. Okay, so we got the dishwasher. You can think about this for every scale. We got the dishwasher. We're gonna start by layering it out. Maybe first you're gonna do cutlery for a week or two. Then you're gonna add cups, then bowls, then the top rack and Bottom rack, then the top and the bottom rack together. Right, thinking of this, as I'm not gonna do this overnight, I'm gonna build this slowly over time. So instead of thinking tomorrow my kids are gonna unload the dishwasher, we're gonna think in about six weeks or maybe two months, we're gonna get them to the point where we're on the dishwasher. In the beginning, it's helpful to help do it together and then slowly build other responsibilities and talk about that. Okay, we're gonna work on this together to build your skills. Eventually, this is gonna be one of your family responsibilities. 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, where 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? So, when we are thinking about introducing responsibilities and having responsibilities, how do you broken them down into smaller tasks 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. All right, if you have any questions, drop in the in the comments, send me an email. I'd love to hear from you. Tara gratoca. Forward slash podcast. Until next time.