Raising kids is all about the unpredictable: juggling responsibilities at work and in your personal life with constant shifts in your child’s mood, interests, abilities, and needs. If you leave the predictable activities — like cleaning, laundry, meal prep, and cooking — to the burden of daily decision-making, you won’t have the energy and time to deal with the true surprises, like the post-dinner temper-tantrum.
When it comes to logistics — the stuff that has to get done to keep yourself, the kids, and the household running — the goal is to automate the predictable, while shrinking each system to its smallest footprint. Here are a few ideas to stimulate your thinking:
Cleaning:
Set aside specific days and times. If you do housework in any free moment, you’ll never be able to rest because there is always more to do. Instead, set aside specific hours to do specific chores: wash and fold kids’ laundry Monday nights, dust and vacuum Sunday afternoon, and so on. Setting aside specific hours will force you to prioritize and let some things go.
Team-clean your house with the kids. Cleaning as a family is another way to make a semi-arduous chore into a fun family activity. Attack each room as a unit (instead of sending one person to the bathroom and another to vacuum the living room) and make a game out of seeing how long it takes you to clean the entire house.
Laundry:
Do the laundry by person. Instead of doing a load of darks, followed by a load of lights, and a whole load of checking to see whether that blue t-shirt is Billy’s size 6 or Andrew’s size 8 and a rousing game of whose socks are these, anyway!? — do a separate load of wash for each person, on the same day every week. That way, your daughter knows she’ll get her favorite t-shirt back every Wednesday and your son knows when it’s time to pick his laundry up off the floor!
Always buy the same style and color socks. You’ll save a lot of time matching up pairs.
Meal Planning & Cooking:
Automate meal planning with go-to recipes. Come up with a few fast, go-to dinner recipes and put each on an index card, with ingredients and instructions on the back. Every Sunday, have your family select the meals they want for the week ahead. No more frantically brainstorming dinner on your commute home from work!
Pre-assemble dinner kits. Compile all of the ingredients you’ll need for dinner in a clear bin, into which you also toss recipe instructions. No thinking required, just go
Many of us make the mistake of martyrdom, striving for perfection-level housekeeping — which gets destroyed in three seconds of play — as a physical representation of our love… don’t you see how much I do for you? But your kids — and perhaps, even your spouse — likely don’t see how much energy you’re really expending. And even if they do see it, and appreciate it, it doesn’t replace the presence and connection that they truly crave from you.
If you can lay your cards out on the table, and create a system and schedule that works for everyone, you’ll open up the time and space for you and your family to focus on the things that truly matter — like lightening up, opening up, and enjoying each other for the unique individuals that you are and the family you’ve created.