Week 5: Learning Life Skills with a Room Cleaning Checklist

Getting kids to clean their rooms can be a constant battle. My older son loves to practice his debate skills by pointing out that there’s no reason to clean it since it’s just going to get dirty again.  Definitely my favorite argument to have with him.

My younger son doesn’t bother to argue, he just breaks down in a puddle of tears because he’s overwhelmed at the prospect of tackling such a large task.

And that’s where The Trip Clip can help. Children often find the things we ask them to do to be overwhelming, because they honestly don’t know HOW to clean their room.  As adults, we understand all the individual tasks involved with cleaning a room, but a child really may not know how to break it down. For me, this was one of those surprising moments as a parent where I realized something that seemed obvious to me really needed to be taught.

The Room Cleaning Checklist is all about teaching your kid HOW to clean their room by breaking down an overwhelming task into smaller tasks they can understand and tackle on their own.  “Put your dirty clothes in the hamper” is much easier to tackle than “Clean your room.” It also makes it clear to them what your expectations are so that they won’t fail inspection once they’re done!

And the great thing about using The Trip Clip to create your checklist is that you can fully customize it to your child’s personal mess.  Here are list appropriate for each of my kids’ rooms:

There are currently 39 images to pick from to create your own room cleaning checklist, and you can also use the “add my own items” text option to include anything not already available.  What would your list look like?