3 Tips For Teaching Your Young Kids How To Clean

As a parent, one of your main jobs is to prepare your kids for life outside of your home. However, because teaching these types of life skills often requires a lot of time and patience, many parents unknowingly put them off for too long until they realize that their children are ill-equipped for adulthood. But if you start with some good habits from a young age, your children will grow up knowing how to do things like cook and clean for themselves as soon as they’re ready to be on their own.

To help you in teaching these skills to your children, here are three tips for teaching your young kids how to clean.

Give Them The Right Supplies

While it’s not great for anyone to use harsh or dangerous chemicals when they’re cleaning, you should be especially careful about what cleaning products you give to your children when they help to clean your home.

According to Brooke Mahan, Meg Resnikoff, and Elle Walker, contributors to Parents.com, some of the best cleaners to use in your home and to have your kids use as well are natural, all-purpose cleaners. By giving them a spray bottle of this type of cleaner and a microfiber cloth, they’ll be able to help you clean almost any surface of your home without having to be afraid of hurting themselves or your belongings.

Make It A Game

For many young children, learning how to clean can easily be turned into a game that they actually enjoy doing.

To show you how this can be done, Apryl Duncan, a contributor to The Spruce, recommends trying things like timing your kids, putting on music while you clean, or seeing who can clean the most in a certain period of time. If you can make picking up something that’s fun and even competitive, your kids might learn to enjoy it a bit more.

Put Cleaning As Part Of The Routine

Once you’ve decided to start teaching your kids how to clean, it’s important that you stick with it so that it becomes a routine in your home.

Marie Hartwell-Walker, a contributor to Psych Central, shares that by making cleaning and tidying up your home a routine that your kids get familiar with, it will easily be able to translate into their lives as teens and adults. Also, if cleaning and other household chores are something they do on a consistent basis, you might find that it’s less of a struggle to get your kids to complete their jobs.

If you want to instill in your children the skill of keeping a home neat and clean, consider using the tips mentioned above to help teach them these skills when they’re young.