When we were growing up, Saturday was cleaning day. We lived out in the country, and it was always our hope that after we spent the morning dusting and vacuuming, we’d be able to “go to town” with our mom for weekly errands. I’m sure lots of you grew up the same way. We got a bucket of hot soapy water to wipe the baseboards, we got out the hose so we could vacuum the living room furniture, and every once in a while my mom would let us rearrange our room. We took turns between toilet cleaner and shower scrubber.
Since I’ve had a home and family of my own, we’ve never done it that way. I was a stay at home mom for many years, so I just cleaned everything all of the time (and I admit, I didn’t teach my kids or make them help me much.) We also have weekends full of sporting events, play dates, brunch and coffee dates, and yoga classes. There’s no time to clean!
As some families do, for the last 12 years I’ve had someone come into my home weekly to do the major cleaning. Of course I still clean all the time, too, but I wasn’t doing the bathrooms or kitchen floors on my own. That changed at the beginning of March when my husband Josh and I decided to save that money and start doing the housecleaning on our own. We felt like it was an important thing to show the kids, to lead by example.
As a modern day family that is trying to raise good humans that can function in the world on their own, it’s our new goal to mesh the old and new together and find a way to make it work. We need to set expectations for the kids and also be realistic about the busy-ness of life these days vs when we were younger.
I’m sure I’m not the only one who sometimes wonders, “How did we get here?” I have kids that don’t know how to dry dishes, clean a toilet or use the hose part of the vacuum cleaner. As much as technology has changed our lives from when I was growing up, these are essential skills! I’ll even admit to “feeling bad” expecting my kids to clean up after themselves. They’re so busy, have so many pressures on them, have so many obligations. It sounds crazy coming out of my mouth and onto this page, but it’s true.
I just finished reading Untamed, the new book from Glennon Doyle. It is a MUST READ for every woman out there, truly world changing. One section that really helped me understand the “how did we get here?” thought talks about the “memos” different generations of parents receive. The kind of over-riding parenting philosophy of the time that dictates how kids are (generally) raised. She claims that our parents were told, “They’ll figure it out.” They lived their lives and their children (my generation) did just that. My generation, on the other hand, got the “life is hard for them, don’t let them struggle or feel any pain ever” memo. How accurate is that? Don’t get me wrong, I do agree that life is hard for them, they face many different pressures than teenagers of the past. But isn’t that all the more reason to give them every bit of skill that we possibly can to help them to be highly functioning adults?
A couple areas we’ve chosen to focus on first in our home are laundry and bedroom/bathroom cleaning. One thing we've noticed is that it's easier to just do it than to teach them how to do it. But we also know that's not going to stop us from making these changes. My husband Josh is a laundry master. There isn’t an over half-full dirty laundry basket anywhere in this house if he has anything to say about it. But we realized that our kids have no responsibility in it whatsoever. They leave to go to their other parents’ homes with dirty laundry in their room and they come back to clean, folded laundry on their beds. Not exactly how it works in the real world, right? So we’ve developed a new system where they bring their dirty laundry to the laundry room and when they come back, it’s clean and in the laundry room ready to be taken to their rooms. Yes, we’re still doing most of the work, but it puts a part of it back on them. As far as bedroom and bathroom cleaning, we’re trying to stick to an every-other week schedule. We quickly learned that “go clean your bathroom” isn’t quite descriptive enough. I made a long checklist for them to follow. It probably annoys them, but it really does help them to know what to do, and to make sure they do a thorough job.
Like many moms, I’m an “Acts of Service” love language person. I LOVE doing things for the people that I care about. It fills me up to be thoughtful and helpful. I’ll admit that it’s kind of tripped me up in the parenting department. My kids expect and probably take for granted things that I do that they could (and probably should) be doing for themselves. I’m committed to being more self-aware in this area. I know that I can still do things for them, but I need to also help them develop necessary life skills. I also need to expect a little pushback. Kids that are used to their mom doing so much for them are going to have some growing pains while they adjust to doing more on their own.
If there’s a #brightside to this strange time of #stayhome, I think it’s that we can slow down. Really think about how our day to day households run. Make some changes that will benefit the family. Practice, because nothing we change comes easy! Teach our kids how to clean a toilet, how to start that load of laundry on their own, or whatever it is in your house that kids could learn to do for themselves. Hopefully, when “normal” returns, we can look back on this time and appreciate the opportunity it gave us to re-evaluate some things and come out better on the other side.
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