Book Review: Managers of Their Chores

I believe that part of my children’s education is for them to learn to manage a household. They need to learn to cook, bake, clean and maintain a home. Outside the house they should learn basic gardening skills, basic car maintenance, etc. This goes for both boys and girls.

One of the challenges of home schooling is that the children, well –are home all day. This, in turn, means that they make a mess all day. Plus, the home schooling, stay at home parent is not only chief cook and bottle washer, but a teacher as well, often of multiple pupils. It’s easy to get overwhelmed. Even a family that does not home school often finds it difficult to get a good chore system in place.

A couple of years ago I thought I was doing pretty well training my children to do chores, but I realized I was falling into the trap of saying, "go clean your rooms" and then expecting my children to just know what to do. Lack of direction and consistency doomed our chore efforts from the start. I knew I needed to make a change.

I found the Managers of Their Chores book, published by the Maxwell family that brought us Managers of Their Homes. This book helped me set up a chore system that worked almost immediately and that is adaptable as my children grow and our situation changes.

Managers of Their Chores (MOTC) is a complete chore planning and implementation kit. Included is the spiral bound book Managers of Their Chores , a “ChorePack” Kit, tools for developing your own chore system, and access to the www.chorepacks.com website.

The 8 ½” x 11” book contains a chore library, chore assignment worksheets, a ChorePack checklist, and a template for creating chore cards. Once you have registered your book, you may access the website which includes forums, downloadable worksheets and templates and free clipart for the pre-readers in your family.

The heart of the system, the ChorePack Kit includes enough supplies for four children. Additional kits are available for purchase if you have more than four children doing chores.

The ChorePack Kit includes 4 ChorePacks, one 3-ring, vinyl page holder for storing chore cards, and approximately 20 sheets of white cardstock for creating the chore cards.

The Maxwells, a homeschooling family of 8, take you step by step in creating a chore system for your family. MOTC has some good chapters on why chores are important for children. Then it gets into the real meat - determining what chores need to be done to keep your home running, how often they should be done, when and by whom.

Each child has a set of cards, called ChorePacks. Each card has the child’s name, chore, time of day (morning, lunch, dinner, etc) and a number written on them. At designated chore time, the child picks up their ChorePack which is loaded into what looks like a name badge holder you'd get at a convention. They wear their ChorePack while they accomplish their chores, in the order that they are numbered. When chores are complete, they turn their pack in to the supervising parent. If they have more chores to do later, like after dinner, mom loads that chorepack into the holder for the appropriate time.

ChorePacks not in use are stored a nice plastic page, complete with hole punches to put in a binder if you'd like. The holders are all very well constructed, made to hold up a lot of use over the years.

No age range is specified for this book and kit, but I would recommend it for all children. However, a high schooler may find wearing the ChorePack childish. This issue is not addressed in the book, but I think that parent and child could easily come up with a solution. Pre-teens and younger children would particularly benefit from this system. For pre-readers, you can use your own clip-art or even pictures of the child doing the chore, or download the free clipart from the ChorePack website. Even mom can use a chore pack for her regular household tasks!

We’ve really enjoyed using the Managers of Their Chores system. My children like being able to tackle their chores independently and I like not having to nag them! All that is needed is a simple reminder of “it’s chore time” from me and off they go to get their chore packs.
When they turn them in to me, I know the chores are done and I can go check their work.

I appreciated the perspective of Teri Maxwell, a mom with many children, some of whom are already grown. She has “been there, done that,” while I am still in the trenches. She has compiled a huge chore "library" will help you determine what sort of things need to be accomplished in your home. She stresses that the chores done in their home are not necessarily the ones you need to do in your home. The sample chore lists from the test families were also very helpful to get an idea of what other similar age children are capable of doing. I appreciated the insight on selecting chores for each child based not only on age but on ability as well.

One warning - I don’t agree with all of the Maxwells’ parenting philosophy. Some of their opinions caused me to shake my head. While I found some of these statements distracting, I was able to put my personal feelings aside and concentrate only on the chore system.

Fans of the Maxwell’s book, Managers of Their Homes, will enjoy Managers of Their Chores. If you have never had a good chore system in place - this is the book for you. It will take you step by step, from the very basics, through getting a chore system up and running in your home. If you are happy with your current system, but would like things to be even better - this book will still have a lot to offer you.

I have used the MOTC system for two years now. Every few months I need to tweak our system as our children grow older. My children have actually moved away from using the ChorePacks to guide them, but every so often I find that chores are starting to slip – so we go back to the ChorePacks for a while until things are running smoothly again.

Managers of Their Chores is $25.00; add-on kits for an additional four children are $7.00 if purchased at the same time as the book. Add-on kits are $9.00 if purchased at a later date. The whole systems can be purchased at Titus2.com: Managers of Their Chores.

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While her children are busy with their chores, Lorri sits and blogs about her day at The Mac and Cheese Chronicles.



Book cover photo used with permission of authors.