Doing chores around the house may seem simple, but it can significantly impact your kids’ and teenagers’ lives in ways they may not realize until they are older.
Teenagers can learn essential relationship skills from doing chores, such as teamwork, cooperation, communication, and clarity, and feeling a sense of accomplishment upon completing a task. On top of these skills, they can learn important steps in caring for a family and home, like cleaning, organizing, preparing meals, and gardening.
Even though doing chores isn’t most people’s first choice for spending some time, Eva Carlston Academy reviews that by developing a family chore system is one of the several valuable steps to take when creating a happy family that functions well.
Social and emotional benefits
Doing chores can help a child or teenager feel that their contribution to the family is important. Fostering the desire to feel a sense of accomplishment upon completing even a simple task can help a child or teenager to feel a sense of responsibility and participation.
Over time, the repetition of these tasks and the positive outcomes associated with them can leave a child feeling more competent and self-assured. Not only will doing chores help a child or teenager to feel more confident in their daily life, but it can also teach them important lessons in relationships as well.
Working together with a sibling or as a family unit to complete a task can teach lessons about teamwork and cooperation, as well as ways to communicate clearly with each other. It can also teach valuable lessons about time management and the prioritization of tasks.
According to the Australian parenting website, doing chores can actually help reduce family stress, and may help your household to function better overall.
Other important life lessons
Not only does doing chores help instill positive routines and cycles in a teenager’s life, but it can also help prepare them for adulthood, so they can feel confident to face the world as an adult when it comes time to leave the house.
Doing chores as a child can help teach important skills to help them later in life, like cooking food for their own future family to eat, cleaning and organizing to support a healthy and hygienic home and atmosphere, and growing food in a garden to make for dinner. From learning how to do the dishes to doing laundry, to cleaning the bathroom, a weekly chore list can do wonders.
Doing chores for teens in therapy
Doing chores is one of the first opportunities for children to learn how to implement positive structure into their life and strive for that feeling of accomplishment associated with completing a task well.
Teens in therapy can implement small changes into their life, which over time can yield big results if followed through with. Many teens in therapy may feel that their lives lack positive structure in their household, and one small change to consider implementing would be developing a chore list to create some structure in daily life.
