15 Ways to Raise a Helper

Learn how to raise internally motivated children who enjoy helping with the chores with this list of 15 ways to raise a helper.

Try these simple parenting tips to get kids to help with chores around the house and garden. Young children love to feel useful and naturally enjoy helping with the chores. They enjoy being at your side, receiving their support and guidance, because they don’t even realize that it’s work yet! All they want is to do what you are doing — let them!

Allowing young children to help with chores, even when it makes it harder for us, encourages this intrinsic aspect of their nature. Conversely, we eliminate this natural tendency by discouraging kids from helping with household chores and duties. Children see us working, and they want to be like us. So why not nurture this natural desire to help and be a part of the family?

Related: How to Raise a Helper

chores for kids - child watering garden helping with the chores

Related: Tools for Raising Helpers

How to Raise Children Who Enjoy Helping with Chores

In our home, we don’t make our children do chores or put them in timeout. Instead, we are helping our kids learn life skills and home habits they will use to care for themselves for the rest of their lives. We think this is a much-needed shift in perspective that turns children into the helpers they are born to be!

When you raise a helper, you will not need to nag, lecture, or yell. Instead, children will slowly learn how to help you over time. Show them how to follow a simple daily and weekly rhythm that will keep them happily working around the house, yard, and garden beside you.

Of course, children need plenty of guidance and instruction from their parents and teachers, which is why we must encourage and guide them from the moment they can walk. This helps make completing daily chores and household duties a well-ingrained habit. Use visual routine cards to help children, toddlers, and adults maintain household rhythms.

When I worked as a nanny and early childhood educator, I discovered that raising a child who helps around the house is just as easy as raising one that doesn’t. Use the list of 15 positive parenting tips below to raise internally motivated children who help you around the house with age-appropriate tasks!

chores for kids - child cleaning a counter helping with the chores

15 Ways to Raise Children Who Help with Chores and Household Duties:

Raise children who will assist you with household chores with the positive parenting tips below.

1. Position Babies and Toddlers so they can watch you working and doing chores:

Children are imitative creatures. That’s a fancy way of saying they learn everything by watching and imitating the people around them from birth. In other words, babies and toddlers model the behaviors, actions, and speech that they see and hear from the people around them. This inborn trait illustrates the importance of doing household chores with babies and toddlers while they are still young.

I know it’s easier to work and get chores done when children are sleeping or gone. But it’s really important for young children to see you working and doing chores around the house, or they will not know what to do. It may seem trivial, but I assure you it’s not. I realized how well this worked as a nanny and early childhood educator.

For example, I always needed to do chores in front of the children. After we had eaten, I wiped the table and cleaned the kitchen. When we finished an activity, I’d invite them to help me put it away. Before I realized what was happening, the children in my care started helping with the chores. They began to copy what I was doing because of their innate drive to imitate others.

2. Model How to Do the Task, chore Or Action:

Model how to do the task. Show your children how to do basic household chores and guide them as they work alongside you. Children like to watch others and imitate what they see, and learn best when shown how to help with chores and guided with loving support.

In Waldorf and Montessori education, teachers demonstrate basic actions before asking children to work on a new task. The care they take is evident in their students’ ability to help out at home. Following positive parenting tips like these can help you do the same.

3. Complete the action as you would like it to be done:

Because children imitate what they see, it is essential to model how to do the chores and duties that you expect them to complete in the manner you would like them to be done. Your children will show you how good your example was, or wasn’t, so it’s important to set a good example and offer your guidance and support.

It’s even more important not to get angry with them for doing a sloppy job when our example isn’t up to par. Children don’t know how you meant to do the task or how you wanted to do the chore; they only know what they saw you do. My daughter often teaches me that I need to set a better example, and sometimes she shows me that I’ve been doing a pretty good job. But I can’t blame her for my mistakes as a role model.

For example, I always wondered why Montessori teachers recommend wiping the table in up-and-down or side-to-side motions that go completely across the table, rather than in circles when working with children. As soon as I saw my daughter copying my sloppy circles in her animated toddler fashion, I decided to give it a try. Over time, it set a much better example for wiping a table — lol!

4. Allow Children to start helping As Soon As they start walking:

Your children want to be with you, doing what you are doing. As soon as a child can move around on their own, they can help. They have been watching you their whole life, and they can’t wait to get started. Trust me, it’s all they want to do.

When you allow children to help from the beginning, it becomes a part of who they are. Helping becomes a habit. It becomes their normal. Their way of life. Find simple tasks they can do to help and allow them to imitate you in whatever way they can. When you do this, they love learning and how you raise a helper from birth!

child doing chores around the house and garden

5. Don’t Discourage an EaGer Helper:

Whatever you do, don’t discourage an eager worker. It doesn’t take long to teach children that you don’t want them to help. If you’re reading this, I’m pretty sure that’s not what you want to teach your children.

But, I’ll be honest. Working with children when they are babies and toddlers and showing them how to assist you can be challenging. It can even be downright painful at times. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve wanted to get my daughter out of the way so I could get the household chores done. But, of course, there will be times when we cannot include our children. Would you please do your best to handle it gracefully?

6. Invite, guide, and allow young children or make an agreement with teens:

While young children do best when we allow them to help, older children need to agree on age-appropriate chores and tasks. Please don’t push, force, or shame your children. Instead, allow young children to play and come and go as they please.

This way, your children will learn from watching you work, helping with the chores, or figuring out how to entertain themselves. This agreement will create a win-win-win situation. Trust me. You’ve got nothing to lose!

Whatever you do, don’t stop working because toddlers, preschoolers, or kindergarteners don’t want to help every time you need to get something done. On the other hand, please don’t ignore them for hours and hours while you work either. Find the balance, and you can’t go wrong.

Older children and teens will need a bit of guidance and sometimes a little tough love to learn to complete their duties and honor their agreements. I have created a course, “Organizing Life with Kids,” and a digital resource to help here: Home & School Tools for Kids.

7. Use kind words:

What we say and how we say it matters. Our children want to please us. Watch your language while helping with the chores, and be careful not to bruise their self-esteem with harsh words. Unfortunately, it’s not hard to discourage a little worker bee and bruise their self-esteem. Use kind words and gentle tones as much as possible.

8. Guide and encourage your children as they work:

Help young children learn to help with the chores by offering your support when needed, but please don’t do their duties for them. Older children will need your guidance to meet their responsibilities and finish the chores they agree to do. Do the best you can, and remember to be gentle with yourself and your children along the way.

chores for kids - "Tell me and I forget, teach me and I may remember, involve me and I learn." ~Ben Franklin — My daughter is helping her grandma plant Thyme in the garden

9. Offer support and Guidance but don’t take over:

Unless there is a safety issue, allow your child to complete simple tasks rather than stepping in to do it for them. Each time you do something for a child that they can do for themselves, you limit your child and increase your workload. Instead, allow children to gain mastery by having them complete simple chores at your side.

When we continue to do things for our children when they can do most things independently, we will teach them that we will always do everything for them. Still worse, we teach them that we can do everything better than they can. Children will continue to let us do everything for them afor as long as we teach them this. Why should they bother trying to help when you are better at everything and always do it for them?

Of course, there will be times when you will need to step in to help them with their chores. That’s not what I mean. The idea is to guide and support them alongside you when they are young and to support them in becoming increasingly independent over time. This will help them feel valued and like they are an integral part of the family, which they are.

Related: Shadow Art Outdoor Science

10. Teach children that mistakes are opportunities to learn:

This one has more to do with our example than with our words. It’s important to show our children how to admit when we’ve made a mistake, learn from it, accept our responsibility for the role we played, apologize when needed, dust ourselves off, and move on, even when we get upset.

We do this every single day. Our children are watching our every move and mirroring back what they learn. After all, everyone makes mistakes. And, children are often more upset with themselves than you are with them when they “mess up.”

When children make mistakes, they often fear you will be angry with them. So do your best not to scare your children with harsh words and phrases that you can’t erase. Instead, teach children that mistakes are opportunities to learn, and challenges can help us grow stronger.

When they make a mistake, ask kids questions like:

What did you learn from this (lesson)?
How do you think you can do better next time?
What, if anything, can you do to make it right?
Do you need more support with this task in the future?

11. Complement their efforts, not their ability:

When praised for their effort, children develop a healthy mindset toward helping with the chores. Here’s why:

When children are thanked for their effort, they are more likely to attribute mistakes to a lack of effort rather than a lack of ability.
When children are praised for their ability, they are more likely to feel like failures and lose motivation to help when mistakes are made.

Focus on specific examples of effort or accomplishment when positively reinforcing a behavior. For example, use phrases such as, “You worked hard to get that window clean,” or “Thank you for helping me sort the laundry. I appreciate the effort you made.”

12. Don’t redo anything they did in front of them:

Please don’t re-do or “fix” what your child did in front of them. Doing this will make them feel both unworthy and undervalued. Children (and adults) who don’t feel “good enough” are much less likely to help with household chores.

For example, if your child is helping you fold laundry and you don’t like how they did it. Please wait until they are long gone to re-fold it. Thank them kindly for their effort, and do what you need to do later, or at least out of their eyesight.

13. Offer Practical Life activities or Home Life Activities:

Think of practical life activities like home economics for little ones. They are designed to provide real-life experiences for children, helping them learn to assist with household chores and develop independence.

Dr. Montessori created “Practical Life Exercises” to teach children how to perform everyday activities and household chores. She believed that these activities would help children become independent members of the household. In Waldorf education, these activities are called Home Life Activities.

You don’t have to know anything about Montessori or Waldorf education to offer these types of activities to your child. A few options are listed below.

Cutting a Banana
Squeezing an Orange
Flower Arranging
Sorting Laundry
Folding Washcloths

14. Establish household rhythms:

Children thrive on rhythm in the home. Regular, weekly, and household rhythms help children learn what to expect day by day, month by month. For example, children are more likely to help out around the house when they know what’s coming, especially if they have the tools to do so.

If dusting day is on Wednesday morning at home, your kids will know what to expect and be more likely to help. However, children need a lot of guidance and support when learning to meet their commitments. Lucky for you, we have several resources to help. Use Visual Routine Cards and Home & School Tools for Kids to help you. Or, learn more about our signature program, Organizing Life with Kids!

Having a regular rhythm is also a great way to make sure we make time for self-care. Motherhood is tough. We can not care for another if we are not caring for ourselves. Put you-time on the weekly schedule. Grab your FREE Weekly Planning Guide to get started. The kids will learn that your time is sacred and give you the time to make it a daily habit.

15. Give them their own tools:

If you want kids to help, give them the tools to do the chores. Tools are magical objects to children. They see us using them, and they want to use them too. When you give a child a tool, it is as if you are saying, “You are good enough to help, you are valued, and you are worthy.” That is exactly what kids need and want to hear.

Check out Tools for Raising Helpers for a list of ideas. Most of the simple tools make great gift ideas for Christmas or a birthday. One of my daughters’ favorite tools is her cleaning kit. I must have fooled her into enjoying it somehow, because cleaning is not my favorite activity. I also have a few printable resources for children that you may find helpful:

chores for kids - child cleaning counter helping with the chores — ***My daughter is using her cleaning kit on our DIY outdoor art table & mud kitchen.***

Raise Helpful Children as part of a Complete Education:

Raising an internally motivated child is essential to your child’s home education. Homelife is one of childhood’s developmental domains, including language (reading & writing), math, science (STEM & STEAM), art, music, gross motor, fine motor, sensory, and social-emotional learning.

The primary lessons of home life are learning to help around the house and to be independent. I don’t know a single parent out there who doesn’t want to raise a kind, helpful, and intrinsically motivated child.

Help them help you, to help them, become the helper they were born to be! Don’t forget to pop over to have a look at the other articles in this series about raising helpful children:

Learn more about Nell Regan Kartychok, author and photographer of the “Raising Helpers” Series HERE, and Rhythms of Play HERE!

More Positive Parenting Tips and Resources

Make it easy on yourself! Learn how to raise a child that will help you with household chores, gardening, and yardwork with these 15 ways to raise an internally motivated helper.

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