Declutter Your Home – How to Get Your Family to Help
Caring for a family can be a full-time job all by itself. However, as a mother of three, I can testify that holding down a full-time job and being a mother can be an overwhelming job. There is good news – you do not have to do all the work alone. Use a tool that you may be using at work – delegate! The key to having a successful home life is summed up in one word and that word is TEAMWORK.
By definition, teamwork implies a group working together for a common goal or interest. This does not mean a boss trying to force everyone to do their bidding. I don’t know if you have tried the Boss method lately, but from my experience, it does not work very well. Lots of friction and resentment build up until the whole thing blows up.
How can you create a team atmosphere? Divide the responsibilities. Let capable members of the team organize their tasks. Decide on a goal such as having clean clothes. Train the leader so they can divide the laundry into groups such as whites, colored clothes, and towels. Give them some guidelines to follow.,
Supervise the task to confirm they understand how to do the laundry so you don’t wind up with pink underwear that did not start as pink and then back away from the task and give the responsibility to the team.
A key element here is to be thankful and give praise where it is due. If you approach this with the attitude of they should have been doing this all along and this is just a small part of what you have always had to do, then they will resent it and not want to continue helping.
I found that my children enjoyed helping when they were given the freedom to schedule how and when their task was done. They enjoyed helping with vacuuming and cleaning windows if I was thankful and praised them for a job well done. Then when we got our tasks completed, we would sometimes go out for a treat.
The treatment did not have to cost money. It could just be time spent together as a family. We sometimes went to the park and took a walk or planned a longer trip together. I could do more things with them because I now had more time available for fun and spending my time with them was my idea of fun.
Enjoy your family and tell them you love them. It pays higher dividends than any bank account.
