On days when your entire family stays home or when the house help is on leave, your workload increases manifold. Since everyone is home, there are more meals to prepare, more dishes to do and more chances of things getting messy. You also need to be more creative to keep your little ones occupied. This may get a bit overwhelming for you.
Here are a few simple tips to ease the load of housework by involving all members of the family. A family that stays together and works together, gets more time together!
1) Organise and Delegate
It would be a good idea to start with a list of ‘work to be done’ split by day and week. Prioritise it too. There is no need to do every chore every day. Some chores like cleaning and disinfecting should be done daily, but work like cleaning the closet or cabinets can be done once a week.
Once your list is ready, you can assign tasks to different family members. This can be an organised way of starting out. You could also make a timetable with activities written down and the name of the person responsible for it.
But ensure that after every task, each family member thoroughly washes their hands. It’s most important to wash your hands frequently using soap and water, or use an alcohol-based sanitiser, such as those available from Lifebuoy.
2) Involve Kids
You can involve not just the grown-ups at home but also the kids. Simply assigning housework to kids will neither engage nor excite them. To enable them to have a good time while also helping out, you can make each activity into a game. For example, each task could be assigned a time limit to see who finishes first, or each task could have points and whoever gets more points, wins.
There are a lot of other simple ways in which you can make staying home and helping out fun for kids.
3) Simplify the Meaning of Help
If you tell the family that they have to help with housework, they may either get anxious or rebel. It would be good to simplify it for them. Not all work requires skill. Sometimes they can help reduce your workload by NOT doing certain things. For instance, they can reduce the dish load by using fewer utensils every time they eat. Or, they can help keep the house tidy by taking out only what is needed, putting it back in the right place before moving on to the next activity.
4) Show Them How to Multitask
Housework is usually considered intimidating and boring. But you can show your family how it can be done along with other interesting activities. Folding dried clothes while watching TV and sweeping the bathroom floor when they go for a bath are two simple examples.
As you can see, all these tips are easily doable and will get the entire family involved in housework.