Cleaning Toilets With Your Kids
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This is probably one of the least favorite activities for my wife and I in our house. Toilet cleaning is a dirty job, but needs to be done. However, involving your kids in this task can make the task a bit more enjoyable.
Cleaning the bathroom is something I’ve always disliked. It was always my least favorite chore as a child, and it continues to be the chore that I dislike most as an adult. My wife likes it even less than I do, and as such it has always been one of the chores that falls to me.
As I’ve gotten older, I’ve learned to keep things pretty clean in the bathroom while using it. However, that took many years of practice and cleaning bathrooms to get to where I’m at. As my kids are growing up and using the bathroom themselves, the bathroom seems to get dirtier much faster than it used to.
The real question has thus become - how do we get the kids to clean their own bathrooms? It’s of course the question that parents have been asking for ages - how can I get my kids to do all of the housework so that I don’t have to do any of it? I think that’s why there were so many kids in my family.
In all seriousness though, getting kids to help out around the house is important to help them to learn how to do essential tasks as they get older, and to help them understand that most everything has some type of work associated with it. If you’re always cleaning up after your kids and never teaching them to do it themselves, it’s going to be a tough lesson for them when you’re no longer able to do so.
Below are a few things that have helped us to get our kids to help out with cleaning toilets. Now, our oldest is 8, and over the past several months he has stopped helping without complaint - the good days are gone. However, he’ll at least have a base knowing how to clean the bathroom.
Talk them through why you must clean the toilet
As alluded to earlier, teaching your children the importance of doing certain tasks around the house is a key point in helping them to grow up to be responsible adults. If you don’t explain to them the reason for doing a task, they may not understand the point of what you’re doing. The younger they are, the simpler the discussion can be.
With our children, we simply explain that we’ve got to get the toilets clean so that we can live in a nice and clean home, and so that friends and family will feel comfortable there as well. I’m not sure how much they actually internalize, but we always discuss this whenever the task comes up.
Work together with the kids to start
The younger your kids, the more important this will be obviously. As good as our son can do certain chores around the house, throwing him something new usually results in a tantrum and then a really poor job done. We like to have the kids help us with new tasks around the house. This goes along with the next point, but the important key here is that you’re working with your kids to show them the correct way to clean the toilet and what you expect the result to be.
Turn it into a game
No, this doesn’t mean that you let your kids play in the toilet - they’ll do that on their own when they are a toddler. However, you can make this chore fun. For example, you could time your child cleaning the toilet, and then work on beating that time - make sure you have a level of cleanliness that is expected. If you have more than one child that can clean the toilet, you could also start them at the same time and put them up against each other. Whatever you do, make it fun for the kids to do.
Take turns scrubbing
As we have a young toddler, he can’t really clean the toilet on his own. However, he loves to use the toilet brush to scrub the toilet - realistically he’s just playing, but he always wants to help. If you have younger kids, have them take turns scrubbing the toilet - it’s the only time they’ll actually be allowed to play in the toilet. Let your older child (or yourself) scrub the toilet good and clean, but let your younger ones take a turn at the start or end as well. The younger they start, the more likely they’ll be willing to help later on.
Conclusion
Our kids (usually) get excited whenever we say it’s time to clean the toilets these days. Both rush to get the cleaner (it’s up high enough that we have to get it), and get to the first bathroom to start. The more you keep at it, the more likely they’ll be willing to help later on.
