I love Swiffer products. I own them all and verbally worship them to anyone who will listen. My kids love Swiffer products. They often fight over who can help mom clean up the crumbs underneath the dinner table or dust the picture frames on the mantle or wipe up the footprints across the ceramic tile floor on rainy days.
Why the shameless plug for Swiffer you ask? The answer is simple, chores. I’ve been told by different sets of parents that they think my chore chart and chore assignments for my older two children Max and Natalie are “a bit much.” I disagree. I think they have things waaaay too easy and here’s why.
Back when my three brothers and I were latch key kids, we didn’t have the dust and hair attracting fibers of the Swiffer duster or the combo power of the Swiffer dry duster with vacuum action. What did we have you ask? I had a ten year-old t-shirt that my father had finally given up on, a bottle of furniture oil (try cleaning ornately carved elephants made of wood with a ratty old t-shirt and you can talk to me about “a bit much”) and about an hour after school before my mom came home and started cooking dinner. My older brother was in charge of taking out the trash. My brother Ben was in charge of vacuuming. We were all under the age of 10. I can’t remember what my younger brother had to do. Oh yeah, probably nothing. Typical!
Back to my point. My point is that I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal for my children to have chores. I was once told that if you want to reinforce a certain behavior, modeling an activity is the best way to do it. When I started using my beloved Swiffer products, my intention was never to turn my kids into Swiffer-loving cleaning machines. They saw me cleaning and they begged to help. Now that I ask them to do it on a regular basis, they don’t face the tasks with the type of dread and gloom that I may have approached mine when I was 7.
Unless we want to live in a world full of entitled kids, I think we all need to get back to giving our children chores. And, the good news is, Swiffer offers all kinds of coupons on their website!
Why the shameless plug for Swiffer you ask? The answer is simple, chores. I’ve been told by different sets of parents that they think my chore chart and chore assignments for my older two children Max and Natalie are “a bit much.” I disagree. I think they have things waaaay too easy and here’s why.
Back when my three brothers and I were latch key kids, we didn’t have the dust and hair attracting fibers of the Swiffer duster or the combo power of the Swiffer dry duster with vacuum action. What did we have you ask? I had a ten year-old t-shirt that my father had finally given up on, a bottle of furniture oil (try cleaning ornately carved elephants made of wood with a ratty old t-shirt and you can talk to me about “a bit much”) and about an hour after school before my mom came home and started cooking dinner. My older brother was in charge of taking out the trash. My brother Ben was in charge of vacuuming. We were all under the age of 10. I can’t remember what my younger brother had to do. Oh yeah, probably nothing. Typical!
Back to my point. My point is that I don’t understand why it’s such a big deal for my children to have chores. I was once told that if you want to reinforce a certain behavior, modeling an activity is the best way to do it. When I started using my beloved Swiffer products, my intention was never to turn my kids into Swiffer-loving cleaning machines. They saw me cleaning and they begged to help. Now that I ask them to do it on a regular basis, they don’t face the tasks with the type of dread and gloom that I may have approached mine when I was 7.
Unless we want to live in a world full of entitled kids, I think we all need to get back to giving our children chores. And, the good news is, Swiffer offers all kinds of coupons on their website!
Disclaimer: Though I freely admit to exploiting my kids for this blog, the picture included on today's post was not posed. I literally could not get my daughter to give me my Swiffer back. It nearly turned into a wrestling match. I'm not proud.
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God bless the swiff...god bless....
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