The Saturday list that finally stuck
We tried a laminated star chart, a shared app, and a rota with everyone’s initials on it. The thing that worked is a piece of paper with four jobs on it, and it took us three years and about £40 of failed systems to get there.
For about three years we did not have a system, we had a series of announcements. I would notice the house had turned, I would announce that things were going to be different now, and things would be different for between four days and a fortnight.
The laminated chart was the high point of the announcements. I made it in February, on the good printer at Tom’s mum’s, with a column for each child and little star stickers in a tin. It was genuinely lovely. It lasted nine days, and for seven of those I was the only person who touched it — I was filling in stars for jobs I had done myself, on behalf of a three-year-old, which is a sentence I have had to sit with.
Then there was the app. I won’t name it because it isn’t the app’s fault. It worked exactly as advertised: it sent Tom a notification every Saturday at nine, and he did not open it, and I spent several weeks quietly furious with a man who was, at the time, usually already outside doing something more useful than checking a phone. The app didn’t fail. It just moved the argument somewhere I could see it.
What we do now
Saturday morning. Everyone is up anyway. Before anything with a screen in it, there is a piece of paper on the fridge with four jobs on it, and we do them.
Four is the number. I want to be clear that four is not a philosophy, it’s just the number at which our six-year-old is still interested. Five and she starts asking how many are left. Eleven — and the laminated chart had eleven, across two children, colour-coded — is a document, not a morning.
None of it is paid. We tried that later and it went badly.
Nell picks first. That’s the part I’d underline if I were still underlining things for a living. She goes to the fridge and chooses which of the four she’s doing, and the choosing takes about forty seconds and completely changes the temperature of the whole thing. It is not a rota. Nobody is assigned. There are four jobs and the first person to the fridge has the most options, which is also, I notice, why she is now the first person to the fridge.
Rowan is three, so Rowan’s job is a job in the same way that a cat helps with paperwork. He carries one thing to one place. He is extremely proud. It takes longer than doing it myself and that is fine, and I say that as somebody for whom “it takes longer than doing it myself” was, for years, an actual reason not to.
We are usually done by ten. Not always. Some Saturdays we’re at football and it doesn’t happen at all, and the thing I’ve learned there is to skip it rather than move it. A missed Saturday is a missed Saturday. A moved Saturday becomes Sunday afternoon, which becomes never, which becomes another announcement.
The bit I got wrong for years
I thought the problem was motivation, so every system I built was a motivation system: stars, points, a chart with everyone’s initials on it in different colours.
The problem was that nothing had a time on it. “Tidy your room” is not a task, it’s a mood. “The four things on this paper, Saturday, before telly” is a task. Once there was a time, the stickers stopped mattering, and I threw the tin out in June without anyone noticing.
The daily things — the washing, the toys, the paper on the side — are a different problem and needed different answers.
The paper on the fridge now is a printout that I redo every few weeks when it gets too covered in biro. If you want it, it’s below — four rows, five weeks across, tick boxes. It is not beautiful. The laminated one was beautiful.
Things people email to ask
- What age can a child start doing chores?
- Three is old enough for one job, as long as the job is one thing carried to one place. Ours takes longer with a three-year-old helping than it would without, and that is the trade — you are not buying labour, you are buying the habit. By six a child can do a real job start to finish, like stripping a bed, if somebody shows them twice and then leaves the room.
- How many chores should a child have at the weekend?
- Fewer than you think. Four jobs across the whole family is what works here, and the number is set by attention span rather than by fairness — at five our six-year-old starts asking how many are left, and at eleven, which is what our laminated chart had, the list stops being a morning and becomes a document. If you want more done, do fewer things more often.
- Do reward charts and sticker systems actually work?
- Ours did not, and it lasted nine days. The failure was not the stickers, it was that nothing had a time attached to it: “tidy your room” is a mood, not a task. Once the jobs had a fixed slot — Saturday morning, before screens — the stickers stopped mattering and the tin went in the bin without anybody noticing.
- What do you do when you miss a week?
- Skip it rather than move it. A missed Saturday is a missed Saturday and the routine survives; a Saturday moved to Sunday afternoon becomes never, and never becomes another announcement about how things are going to be different now. We miss perhaps one in five for football or being away, and it has not broken anything.
Printable
The Saturday list
Four jobs, five weeks of tick boxes, one side of A4. The sheet that lives on our fridge until it gets too covered in biro.
Anna
Mid-thirties, former magazine copy editor, now works part-time from the kitchen table. Started this as a private record and only made it public because friends kept asking for the recipes.
If this was any use
One load a day
The washing was never finished, which I had accepted as a fact about life rather than a consequence of doing four loads on a Sunday. It is the second thing, and the fix took about a week to bed in.
The school run, worked backwards from the door
We were late four days out of five and I kept trying to fix it by getting up earlier, which is the one thing that doesn’t work. The fix was writing down what the door actually needs and moving all of it to the night before.
Pocket money, and the three systems we tried
A pound a week, paid on a Saturday, not linked to anything. We got there after two more complicated systems, one of which taught our six-year-old that kindness has a price of twenty pence.
Comments
They’re open, but they go through me first — every one is read and approved by hand, which is slow and occasionally very slow. Email is the fastest route, and I answer most of them.
Write to us