Fruit Inspection

Another installment in my blog book tour is up for To Love, Honor and Vacuum! This time I dropped by I’m an Organization Junkie, where Laura is trying to get the world’s women organized so that they’re far less stressed! She’s got an absolutely awesome blog, so do check it out! Here’s some of what we talked about:
How do I get my kids to pick up after themselves and put things back where they belong?

It looks like we’re on the same wave-length here! For this one you have to flick a switch in your brain so that you start thinking of your kids differently. A lot of us believe that we are here to serve our children. We’re to care for them, make a nice house for them, and raise them. But here’s the problem. The way that we serve them may actually be harming our ability to raise independent, responsible adults.

Let me give you an example. If your nine-year-old son walks in the house, drops his coat on the floor and his backpack on the chair, and you pick them up, you’ve taught him to treat you with disrespect. You’ve taught him to act in an unChristlike manner. And that’s not good!

Instead, we need to teach kids to clean up after themselves. But you don’t want to nag, so here’s what I suggest in the book:

Create a penalty box. Everyday after they leave for school, or before lunch, or whenever works for you, walk around the house with a laundry basket and pick up all the stuff they’ve left lying around. Their iPod? Gone. Their favorite sweater? Gone.

If they want it back they have two options: They can redeem it for a certain amount of money, like a quarter, or a dollar, or whatever works based on your children’s ages, or they can wait until “Jubilee day”, similar to what the Israelites had in the Old Testament when all loans were forgiven. Jubilee Day can be every Sunday, or the first Sunday of every month if you think once a week is too often.

The kids will hate this. But don’t worry, because you’re teaching important lessons! You may want to have “free zones”, like the floors of their rooms, but if they leave it in common areas where it is a problem for you, then you have to make it a problem for them.

The beauty of this approach is that it does not require any nagging or yelling on your part. You warn them, tell them what the consequences will be, and then you follow through. Believe me, they’ll learn soon enough! And you can use the money you make to buy chocolate truffles to eat in the bubble bath! Your life will be ever so much more relaxing.

One other thing I want to add here, though, is this: we often focus on “getting kids to pick up after themselves”. But I think that’s a really low goal for kids. Picking up after yourself is learning how to worry about yourself. What we want our kids to start thinking about is the whole family. So make sure you have your kids do chores that benefit everybody, like dusting a coffee table (even a 3-year-old can do that), cleaning a bathroom, or setting the table. Help them to start thinking outside themselves, and you raise much less self-centered creatures. And isn’t that what God wants?