Age appropriate chores for kids of all ages

Hey parents and carers! If you’re here it’s probably because you’re looking for a way to get your kids to start helping out. It can be frustrating to know what are the age appropriate chores your kids can do, right? Well, we hope to simplify this for you by giving you this list of age appropriate chores for the various stages of your kids lives. We hope this helps!

Between the ages of 2-3 your child is developing in so many ways. Emotionally you will see that this is the stage where your kids will showcase the whole range of emotions. If you’ve ever wondered why temper tantrums abound and the phrase “terrible two’s” was coined!

In this stage of development your child will learn to put those emotions into words. Your kids thoughts will also be flourishing and these too will be put into words.

Your kids will learn through play so creating chores based around that notion is a great thing to do! Here are some ideas for age appropriate chores in this age for this year of your kids life.

Between the ages for 4-6 you will see a big change in the way that your kids’ express their feelings. Usually, if they have siblings they can determine what their strengths and weaknesses are in comparison to their siblings.

During this stage encouraging them to do what they are good at, whilst still having them do what they struggle with, can help with their confidence. You can even guide them to take turns assigning chores to do be done by themselves and their siblings.

You can encourage your kids to:

There can be quite a variation between children in this age range but the majority of kids are in the stage of friendship. During this stage kids develop a social awareness. You will see your child will mimic friends’ behaviours and mannerisms. Because of this awareness kids may get competitive.

In this stage your child will know how to take game playing to a competitive level. So keep this in mind when engaging your child in chores and cleaning activities. Make it fun and competitive and you may just have more help!

Just don’t pit kids against each other, because that may not end well. What you can do to make it fun is use a timer or countdown method to see how fast (and well) they can do things!

Here are some suggestions:

This can be a difficult age range! Kids between these ages can still be struggling and discovering their sense of self. This means that they may be more sensitive to what others, including their parents, think of them.

On the plus side, kids usually know how to manage themselves and have more of an initiative to get things done.

For this reason, consider giving your child chores with no deadline. Letting them know that their room needs to be cleaned by Thursday, for example, will help with their time management skills.

At this stage your child will be more self-sufficient. Have you tried telling a kid in this age range what to do?! It’s not fun! Kids at this stage will question authority, and prefer their social circle over family, and that’s totally normal.

Some chores that help with this independence are those that help them manage their time as well as show initiative. If your kid is aware that the bin needs to be taken out when it’s full, for example, then they should be more self-sufficient when the time comes for them to be independent.

Here are some ideas:

So there you have it! Here are just ideas and as we know every family operates differently but hope this helps!

If you liked this post then these other parenting articles will be a good read too.

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