Cleaning Kids

Did you know that most toddlers want to help their parents and most teens don’t? What’s happening with that scenario? For one thing, we adults (into which category I always put young men and ladies progressing through those teen-numbered birthday years) know there are options to spending time. If we use Saturday morning to sleep, talk on the phone, and listen to music, we can NEVER use that same time for practicing an instrument, fixing breakfast for the family, reading a good book, going to a museum, cleaning the kitchen or bedroom, talking with family members, or sharing Christ with someone. It’s a matter of priorities.

Homespun Philosophy or My Ideas about Child Training

My untested, undocumented philosophy is children should experience lifelong priorities and responsibilities before they become conscious of them, to live by the rhythms and routines of  basic living before they can verbalize what is happening. Basic living includes

• hearing and responding to God’s Word
• assuming personal responsibility for personal care and possessions
• careful eating habits
• family working together to care for God’s provisions
• family working together to fulfill His unique cause for which the family was created.

This puts cleaning right up there with things a child should learn. Me doing a quicker, better job rather than hassling with the kids to do it, is sitting on Mount Self-Absorbed, not doing them any favors.

Back to Cleaning: I Thought We Were Done with That!

Cleaning is a practical way to add content to a preschool curriculum. Cleaning skills are tangible, time-able, build-able. While a child’s fifteen minutes is WAY LONGER than an adult fifteen minutes, when tasks meet the fifteen minute adult attention span, subdividing the tasks further to preschool two to three minute components is that much easier.

When children are being trained and/or helping as you clean, you are 1) investing in purposeful time with your children, 2) training life skills, and 3) keeping the house tidy all in the same ten minute blip of time. Such benefits makes thinking about the process of teaching skills worthwhile.

Three Point Skill Training System

A simple three point training system covers virtually any training project for yourself, coworkers, or students, but  since we are concerned with cleaning right now, we’ll apply it to children learning to clean (perhaps alongside a parent who is improving their process themselves!).

The three point system:

1. Professional Preparation
2. Comprehensive Training
3. Transfer to Automation

is further broken down into additional key components:

Professional Preparation

is the work the delegator does before training someone to prepare to effectively train someone else:

1. Time the task to be handed off, enough to get a baseline.
2. Prepare expectation lists.
3. Compile helpful information lists.

Comprehensive Training

 is the work the delegator does with the trainee to adequately show them the ropes.

1. Schedule training sessions, during which you:
2. Demonstrate.
3. Explain.
4. Supervise.
5. Evaluate.

Transfer to Automation

is the work the delegator does for the trainee to assure the skill set and work ethic has successfully transferred.

1. Automate.
2. Evaluate.

I am regularly amazed by how lax professional companies are with implementing these steps. Perhaps those professional people were never professionally trained in their homes first.

Delegation Disease

Or maybe epidemic proportions of the delegation disease are running rampant.  Delegation is healthy when delegators want to develop skill sets and professional repertoire for the good of someone else (think Paul to Titus) and/or the good of the organization. Unhealthy delegation (the delegation disease) is what happens when delegators:

1. want out of a job they don’t want to do. “Delegating” sounds like the responsibility has been handled, when it has been only hand-washed. We know how well that worked for Pontius Pilate.
2. do not understand the entire task. Usually, the superficial levels (the public parts) gets delegated but the tasks under-girding the the surface tasks are often neglected in training.
3. have no time for the job. When that is accurate, how could they possibly invest the necessary extra time to properly train someone else?

Such nefarious treatment of other humans (young or old, professional or family) is an inexcusable waste of human cohesiveness in working for a cause. To keep it from happening in our families, we’ll consider each step in a post of it’s own.