Setting Daily Chores for a Moody Teenager
Parenting is not a topic I usually write about, but there’s a first time for everything. My daughter who is turning 15 in October thinks she can go through life without doing any chores.
Wrong. With all the mood swings myself and @bingbabe have to endure on a constant basis, I thought I would take a stance and impose some, shock horror.. chores!
Source: https://pixabay.com/en/sad-girl-sadness-broken-heart-2042536/
I don’t want to reveal her real name on a public site, so for the sake of this article, she will be named ‘Holly’.
Holly is due to go to Paris on a school trip at the end of June 2018. That’s five weeks from now. She is asking £250 as pocket money, not a small amount but representative of what her friends are taking (or so she tells us). This is for a five day trip, so £50 a day.
I calculated at £10 a chore with 5 chores a week, over 5 weeks that would add up to £250, and placed this chart on the back of the kitchen door.
Is this what it takes for ‘bone idle’ Holly to do something, be it a small thing and not even every day?
Needless to say she was not very happy to see this and even less so when I declared, ‘If you miss a chore, I’ll be £10 richer so please go ahead and keep being lazy’.
Of course, she is my daughter and I won’t see her going short for the trip but something has to be done. I now need to figure out something to keep it going when she returns and I intend to do just that.
I did say to her, ‘You will thank me for doing this when you are 21 years old’; a statement that was vigorously rebuked.
We were all young once, and we all have to start doing some work. I don’t think I’m being mean, this is simply a preparation for what is to come.
All photographs were taken by myself unless otherwise indicated.
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Washing dishes isn't that hard lol. @slobberchops
Chores should be taught at an early age. :D
Moody teenagers are too much moody
Seems to me, if she's smart, that second day of cleaning her room will also be a day off. I wish I could make this much money for doing these tasks. Perhaps once she has done them, she'll see the wisdom of this.
I was a lousy parent in this regard. I asked almost nothing in terms of chores from my children, they had too much homework to do and were working much harder than I was. I shelled out money whenever asked. And they all turned out OK. Of course, none of them were depressed because of social lockdowns.
I started chores when they were too little to think of them as chores, I called it every person participates and after we were done, we would do something fun.
It seemed to work...