Getting other members of your household involved in cleaning the home can make life a whole lot easier for everyone and can certainly lift the weight from your shoulders. Here are a few tips and tricks to get the whole family to help clean the home:
Make it into a competition:
Most people, young and old, can’t resist a little bit of good old-fashioned competition, even when it comes to leaning. Why not assign point values to different chores and encourage members of the family to get as many points as they can at the end of each week. An incentive to gaining the most points will of course, make the competition more appealing, so you could perhaps give a little prize to reward the winner.
Make it into a game:
Keeping a score for each cleaning task is one way of making a game out of it, but why not start something like a family game show and have different challenges such as ‘who can clean the oven the quickest’ or ‘who can vacuum the fastest’? Depending on how willing your family members are, this could be a fun way to get everybody involved.
Take regular breaks:
Even if your family are willing participants in your cleaning games, they won’t want to clean non-stop without any breaks. Make sure that everybody can take a breather now and then, and why not use the opportunity to gather together and have coffee and cake together, or something that will help bring you all together before you go your separate ways to clean.
Make it a set time each day or week:
If everybody in the family is clear about when the cleaning times are, there will be less reason for them to make excuses or be busy with other things; they can plan their time around it and that way, the cleaning is guaranteed to be completed.
If there are small children in your household, then you will surely want to go down the reward route with the cleaning schedule! Some children enjoy mimicking the actions of the adults in the home and will happily grab a duster or throw their laundry in the basket without the promise of a treat or reward, while others will need a little more encouragement and incentive.
Whoever is in your household, make sure that they understand it isn’t just your sole responsibility to keep the place clean and tidy, and if approached in the right way, your family home could be spick and span in no time.