How To Make Chores Fun Again
I'm sure the average parent can tell you, getting a kid to tend to their chores consistently is like trying to get blood out of a turnip. But this doesn't always have to be the case. If you learn to understand what kids thrive on, both as a kid, and as a human, you'll find the key to be able to motivate them for almost anything you need them to do. So what do kids thrive on? FUN! If something can be fun, turned into a game, with challenges, scores, and rewards, it can be worthy of your kid's attention. This is why, about two years ago, I decided to turn doing chores into a game. I could have done it all on my own, but I decided to see if there was a resource out there that already provides this. Low and behold... there is!
Highscore House
Highscore House, for any of you who haven't heard of it, is a free online chore management system, tailored for families with kids. The whole site is structured with fun graphics and easy to use features for setting up your own created tasks for the kids to check off, and your own created rewards for them to buy with stars that they earn when they complete each task.
So for example, you can create a task called "Finish Homework", in the parent dashboard, and assign a number of stars they earn when they check off this task. When they have finished their homework, they can go to their own personal section, their own "room", look on a board of tasks (called "challenges"), and check off the task "Finish Homework". Then you can approve (or confirm) the task being completed and it will reward them with the amount of stars that was assigned for completing the task. It lets you create your own rewards worth any number of stars you choose. So for example, you can create a reward called "Extra Snack" worth 10 stars, and when they have completed enough tasks to earn them up to 10 stars, they can "buy" the extra snack reward with the stars they earned.
Ms Monkey and I used to use Highscore House often a long time ago, but over time, we kind of fell off of using it for a while. Recently though, I have come back to it, wanting to continue using it and update some tasks and rewards. This really is an extremely valuable tool that can save you time and stress in a lot of ways.
Task/Reward Balancing
One of the things I try to keep in mind is to not use tasks and rewards too liberally, and not too restrictively, else Ms Monkey will end up doing something so super easy and fast so often that I will be rewarding her more often than is reasonable without her having to put some actual effort, time and consideration into the task. But I also don't want her to be doing too much work just to get too little of a reward either. So if you use Highscore House, experiment and find a good balance between the two. The site gets updated every now and then with new features to help parents control and tweak elements of task and reward frequency.
If you have used Highscore House before, I'd love to know what your experiences with it have been. Share them in the comments here!
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