“Brush your teeth”, “Make your bed”, “Feed the fish” – parents sometimes feel like a broken record when it comes to handing out chores to their kids. And sometimes (ok, maybe often), rather than delegate, we might do something ourselves because it’s easier than doing battle with the kids or because we know we’ll do it better – I know firsthand how true that is. But I think we owe it to our kids to have them help out around the house – it teaches them responsibility and helps train them to be mature independent adults. And isn’t our job as parents to one day push them out of the nest and watch them fly?
My oldest son recently graduated from college and moved out of state. I’m sad that he’s so far away, yet happy for his great job opportunity and comforted to know that he has the life skills he’ll need (at least most of them) to comfortably and confidently get along in the “real” world. Of course he didn’t just learn those skills overnight – my husband and I have been preparing him for this phase of his life for the past 22 years. We’ve had him and his younger brother participate in a variety of chores, from mowing the lawn to emptying the dishwasher, doing their own laundry to managing their own bank account.
There have been some stumbling blocks along the way, but we view those as teaching moments that are sometimes more powerful than any verbal lesson could be. Without going into great detail and violating his privacy, I’ll just say that my son had an issue with a credit card that really surprised us. It taught us that we can’t only teach by example – explicit instructions are often necessary. Many of my clients are impacted by this same lack of specific training – I’m constantly amazed at how many of them tell me they grew up in organized homes, yet they’ve hired me to help them get organized because they don’t know how to do it. Their parents did everything for them so they never learned the process of being organized. Some of the basic skills I often have to teach them are:
- How to keep a calendar
- How to keep track of bills
- How to set up a filing system
- How to establish a process for doing laundry
- How to put things away when finished with them
I invite you to consider what tasks you’re doing yourself that your kids are capable of handling, and how you can get them more involved in being contributing members of the household. What lessons did your parents not teach you that you wish they had?
Here’s to your life of simplicity, harmony and freedom,
When life gets busy (and when doesn’t it?) we often feel that we have to put our head down and plow full steam ahead to get as much done as possible. While it may seem counterintuitive, taking a break can actually help you accomplish more, and make life more enjoyable at the same time. Giving your mind (and body) a chance to rest can help refocus your attention and boost your energy as well as help relieve stress and sharpen your cognitive ability.
Did you ever notice that clutter seems to attract clutter? When you plop something “here for now” does that one item seem to multiply? Often a few out-of-place items seem to give us permission to continue adding to the jumble. We drop the bag of items from the store by the door because we don’t feel like putting them away right now. We set the mail on the counter “for now” because we don’t have time to deal with it. We dump the laundry from the dryer onto the couch because we don’t have time to fold it just yet. Pretty soon our home looks like a chaotic mess because our habits have allowed the clutter to creep up on us.
It’s hard to believe, but we’re half way through the year – how are your New Year’s resolutions coming along? Was one of them to lose weight? It may not quite be what you had in mind, but if you’re trying to shed a few pounds, one quick and easy way to do that is to clean out the purse, wallet, briefcase and/or bag you’ve been lugging around. Besides lightening your load, it will make the things you carry with you every day more organized and easy to find.
Confucius once said, “The man who chases two rabbits, catches none” – or something like that. Multitasking is a bit like chasing two rabbits – we set our sights on one goal, then shift them to another while still trying to keep track of the first goal. In the end, instead of completing multiple tasks more quickly, they often end up taking longer and aren’t done as well as if we had focused on one at a time.
Last week 
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A recent client of mine (I’ll call her Donna) struggled mightily with getting her clean laundry put away rather than strewing it across the living room couch. As we worked to understand the causes of her challenge, we discovered that she didn’t view putting the laundry away as being at all related to other steps in the laundry process. Instead, she viewed each step (sort clothes, load washer, run washer, empty washer, load dryer, empty dryer, fold clothes, put clothes away) as separate from and unrelated to any other step in the process. In her view, sorting and washing the clothes without having time to do any of the subsequent steps was better than having a mile high stack of dirty clothes. However, operating in this fashion sometimes (ok, often) caused Donna to have to rewash wrinkled clothes that sat in the dryer for several day, or even moldy clothes that sat wet in the washer for a few days.
