Age Appropriate Chores

There comes a time when your child will go from dependent on your support to starting to do things on their own. Once they start making this transition which can begin as early as five years old or even sooner depending on the child, you’ll want to start teaching them about personal responsibilities. The most common method of this type of teaching is having them perform chores around the home which will start to imbue a sense of responsibility that they will carry with them for the rest of their lives.

Remember that chores are not life skills, such as balancing a checkbook, but instead a task that benefits the household in general. You will need to select the right chores based on the child’s maturity level and not so much their physical age as all children mature at different speeds.

The Best Chores For Children Ages 5 & Up

At this age, children have well developed motor skills and should be able to do most of these chores with minimal supervision although you will want to check on them to ensure that the chore was performed correctly. There are personal chores which only apply to the child and family chores where they help out around the house.

Personal
At the age of five, a child should be old enough to know how to dress themselves, make up their bed and bring items from the car to the house when grocery shopping and the like. There may be some tasks such as getting shoes tied or buttoning the fly of their pants that are still a little difficult based on their dexterity, but for the most part they should be able to handle these personal chores rather well.

Household
Here, the number of chores that a child of five and up can do to help around the house. Again, most of these chores either do not require supervision or are done in your presence so that you can oversee them properly.

Set & clear the table with adult supervision

Help prepare food in the kitchen

Feed & water the pets

Match their socks

Hang up towels in the bathroom

Clean floors with dry mop

All of these chores are well within the motor skills and learning abilities of a child who has reached the age of five. Setting and clearing the table will need to be performed under your supervision so that everything is set correctly and picked up before it is cleaned.

Feeding and watering the pets will need to be supervised simply by checking every so often to see if the task has been performed. Children can be forgetful, so it will take time and effort to engrain this into their routine. Hanging up the towels and dry mopping the floor are very simply tasks that children can perform with relatively little difficulty and yet learn the sense of keeping things clean. This also goes with matching socks as they can learn more about color coordination.

In the end, these are the chores that are certainly appropriate for children who have reached the age of five and they should be expanded over time as they grow.

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