Who is mainly responsible for the housekeeping in your home? In several blogs, I have mentioned the importance of delegating housework. Anyone who lives in a home should play some part in keeping it clean and orderly.
However this doesn’t necessarily mean that the delegation of housework will be even. You also have to figure in each person’s age, outside responsibilities and other important factors that may play into it.
For instance when my children were young, I was a stay-at-home mom. Since I was in the home more hours a day than my husband, I pretty much took care of everything inside the house. He was responsible for the outside work.
Today our children are teens and now I am working. Even though I work at home I still have to put in a lot of hours each week, so my husband helps pitch in. I don’t necessarily assign him responsibilities but if he is around and the dishes need to be loaded in the dishwasher or the laundry needs to be thrown in, I will ask for his help and he does it.
My teens are assigned a list of housework (chores) to do each day. It was evenly divided up and each week I rotated their chores. However when my 17-year-old son started working this summer, putting in 27 hours a week on average, I cut back on his housework and either I took up some of the slack or my other two children did.
Needless to say the division of our housework will sometimes change. There may be some adjustments made soon since school is starting up. But the point is that when you are deciding who should be responsible for what housework; take into consideration life circumstances that may affect it.
How does your family divide up the housework? Have you come up with a workable system?
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Photo by tomeppy in Flickr