Chores for children are important for so many reasons but imagining how they can contribute to the success of the home makes chores even better! I love when my son feels like it takes "team work" to make our home run efficiently and smooth. I can see the pride in his face.
When I go into clients' homes, I can see where the "rub" lies and sometimes that's where you get the best ideas! In Portland, Oregon, it's the law for stores to charge people for grocery bags, encouraging consumers to bring and use their own. This not only slows the amount of plastic going into our landfills but also slows it from entering our waterways. Recently, my team and I were in a clients home working on organizing it and I found a pattern; no matter what room we were working in, I kept finding reusable bags. This was a thorn in their side. They had a split level home and by the time they brought the groceries upstairs to the kitchen and emptied the bags, the last thing they felt like doing was dealing with the bags.
I addressed this in a two part process:
A. Get a crate to keep in the back of your vehicle to contain your bags so that they will always be with you when you need to go to the grocery store. This is where they LIVE. This could be soft sided "cube" or a milk crate.
B. Make this your childs' chore: after unpacking the groceries (the adults do this in our house but if you have teens this might also be their job,) it's his/her job to fold the bags neatly and take them back out to this crate to be used again next time.
This is a WIN for:
the parents since they just did the grocery shopping.
the child since it includes them into the "team"
the environment
your pocketbook since you don't have to keep buying bags over and over
the household because those bags don't end up stuffed into every nook and cranny adding clutter to your home and yet another thing to wrangle.
Even younger kids can handle this one! If they are old enough to fold a bag, they can handle it!
When looking at the Home Functionality graph, it addresses THREE areas making this an extra big WIN!
