How to Get Your Kids to Love Cleaning

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Getting your kids to do chores can be, well, a chore. Figuring out how to get your kids to love cleaning can be a challenge sometimes, but when we use strategies to help them make a lifelong habit, children CAN learn to enjoy it.

Have you ever known someone that said, “I’m stressed out, I need to go clean something…?” That has never made sense to me. Cleaning was always a stressor, not a stress-relief! For some reason these crazy people found cleaning relaxing and helped calm them.

After I had kids, and I saw how easy it actually was to encourage them to love cleaning, I realized this is probably how those people grew to love cleaning. Someone instilled a love of cleaning in them! I wanted to make sure my kids had this too! 

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How to Get Your Kids to Love Cleaning

Check Your Attitude

Clean happily (I know it’s hard). I am someone who absolutely hates cleaning. It is really hard for me to be cheerful about folding laundry or scrubbing a toilet. When we do our chores grudgingly, so will our kids.

Treat chores just like another part of your day. Something you just do! Like washing your hands after going to the bathroom. You don’t whine about that; it’s just part of your routine. Treat cleaning the same way. You can even take it further and make it a fun experience.

Learning how to get your kids to love cleaning has a lot to do with learning how to get yourself to love cleaning… How do you approach it? Do you treat it like something that helps bring order to your life or do you treat it like a medieval method of torture? Outlook makes a huge difference.

Let them participate when they are young

How many of you shoo your kids out of the way when you’re trying to do things around the house. I know, it’s just easier to do it alone. A lot of moms try to occupy their kids with other things while they clean. We do this, but then want them to suddenly want to clean after years of playing while someone cleans for them. By then they already think, “it’s ‘mom’s job’ to clean up after me.”

Use that enthusiasm that they have while they’re young to your advantage. Kids love to imitate you and help with whatever you are doing. Use this! Getting them in the habit of cleaning while they are little is the best way to keep them doing chores when they are older. It will already be a habit, a part of their every day, like mentioned before.

We use Force of Nature cleaner so that our kids can clean with us! Theron loves getting to spray and clean! 

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Don’t give rewards

I know, probably very different from what other advice has been. In fact, I’m willing to bet if you are on a hunt for advice on this topic, you might have already read a couple of blog posts saying the exact opposite. But if you really want to learn how to get your kids to LOVE cleaning, not just do it out of compliance, keep rewards out of it. As tempting as it is, try to resist.

This kind of goes along with making it a normal, everyday thing. If we give rewards for cleaning, we reinforce the idea that it’s something awful and they need a bribe to do it. Kids already like cleaning when they’re little. Don’t make them realize it’s not a fun thing by rewarding them!

As a teacher, giving prizes, class bucks, stickers, stamps, small trinkets to motivate kids to work or behave is pretty much the norm. I’ll admit, I do it because by the time they get to me it’s hard to get most of them to do anything without it… Which is exactly the point I’m making!

How Extrinsic Rewards Affect Motivation

Our kids have been brought up with extrinsic motivation for everything. We now have an entire generation (at least where I am) that will only do things for a reward. Feeling good, enjoying the activity, or the sense of accomplishment are no longer enough. No. They must have a prize. A trinket. A worthless toy or piece of candy. Honestly, it’s a problem.

I also started to see this with my son with potty training. All of the advice was to reward your child when they go potty. Give them a sticker each time they go. After they get to the star they get a toy or a treat. It definitely worked. But after a while, we basically had to bribe him or he would pee his pants. And boy, did we bribe him. I would bribe him with just about anything.

I realized I was doing exactly what I hated doing as a teacher and exactly what my education told me not to do, which was Training kids to work for extrinsic rewards. With little ones, it’s important to try to pull on that intrinsic motivation that they already have. It’s already there! All you have to do is help it grow.

Research

The other day I told my kid he could only vacuum for 30 minutes, then we needed to get ready to go bye-bye. I realized after saying this, how crazy it sounded! I’m treating vacuuming like screen time or some special treat. But he really does love it.

After becoming a teacher, and studying child development, I read a lot about how extrinsic rewards actually cause children to lose that motivation that they once had. It can even cause them to no longer want to do activities that they used to enjoy.

It’s really interesting to me that schools are still so big on extrinsic rewards because every educational study and all of my education classes taught me that they completely undermined a child’s intrinsic motivation.

“Child Development” conducted a study in which children were asked to do a task that was of high-interest. Some children were asked to do it just to do it. Others were offered a reward. The children who had not been offered a reward showed a higher interest in the activity weeks later than the students who had been offered a reward for the activity (Green, 1974).

External rewards can actually lower our children’s interest level in an activity or task. You can take a child who LOVES to clean (like most toddler/preschoolers) and actually cause them to hate it by making it about rewards. If they enjoy cleaning let them clean. When the kids look at it as you “allowing” them to vacuum instead of making them vacuum, it changes their attitude about it.

Greene, D., & Lepper, M. R. (1974). Child Development, 45(4), 1141–1145. https://doi.org/10.2307/1128110

This was one of the reasons we chose to send our son to a Montessori school! They hold the belief that children are naturally motivated and focus on helping that motivation grow! 

Create a chore chart

Wait, didn’t you just say don’t give rewards? A chore chart does not have to mean giving a prize or treat. It can actually be a way to bring out some intrinsic (internal) motivation. It depends on the way you do it!

This can be especially good if you missed that golden age of enthusiasm for cleaning (it’s ok). How to get kids to love cleaning who are already hating it is to try to bring back that intrinsic motivation.

Think of when you are wanting to be more motivated and productive in your day. What do you do first? Make a to-do list. At least that’s what I do.

When we have a visual of what we need to do and how much we have already accomplished it helps us 1) stay focused on the tasks and 2) feel good about how much we’ve finished.

I’m sure I’m not the only one who loves checking things off my list and counting how many tasks I completed.

Think of the chore chart the same way. The stickers or checks are not the motivation by themselves. It’s the marking of the task that is the motivation.

Going back to the potty training situation, when I made a change to how we motivated our son things changed. We still used a chart, but it was more or a way for him to display his accomplishment. Not a way to get a prize.

His attitude about going potty changed. Each time he got a sticker we would count the stickers. “Wow!!! 10 stickers!” He was proud of himself and wanted to keep doing better.

Teaching children how to organize their tasks and to take pride in what they have accomplished can help them start to be intrinsically motivated to do it on their own.

Benefits

More than just easing the stress on you, learning how to get your kids to love cleaning helps them long term. Cleaning and chores are a huge part of being an adult. When cleaning is natural and even pleasant for them, running a household and keeping it nice will not be such a challenge because they have been doing it their whole lives!

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