On second thought, why don't you just stay away from my towels?

You’ve all seen them. The helpful internet posts about getting children to do chores. The guilt-inducing blogs about moms who have their sons empty the dishwasher every night. The helpful downloads of chore charts that you can post for your children. Recently my own mom shared this Montessori-inspired checklist on my Facebook page:

Thanks for the blog idea, mom! It's such a beautiful scene: Little independent beings toting the firewood and sorting the silverware while simultaneously learning the satisfaction of domestic work and how to do it properly. In real life, though, this quickly becomes messy, unhygienic and just not worth my limited time.

Please don't misunderstand me. I feel the guilt. I don't want to raise kids that don't know how to clean a toilet or disinfect doorknobs (I just learned that I should be disinfecting the doorknobs) but I also don't want my kids walking through my house dripping chemicals. I'm controlling like that. And have you ever seen clothing folded by an eight-year-old?!? My obsessive-compulsive tendencies already activate when my husband folds the towels and they aren't all the same shape.

I am fully aware that an internal debate about kids doing chores falls squarely under the "First World Problems" column heading. But it is a debate. Between our two kids, we currently have after school activities every weeknight. In around these activities we cram reading, math and piano practice, dinner and showers. If there is any time leftover (and sometimes there's not) they get 30 minutes to play together or with neighborhood friends. I have told myself for a long time that I will start asking them to do more on the weekends, but that is when we all want to unwind or are off on other adventures.

Our checklist has a lot fewer chores.

For now, I require our girls to keep their rooms clean and beds made and that is about it. I did get sick of yelling the same mantra five times every morning: "Go upstairs, make your bed, brush your teeth, put clothes in the hamper and turn out the lights." I made them their own checklist and put them in picture frames. That way they could check them off with an dry erase marker. This worked great for a week until the novelty wore off, but here is a PDF of the list if you'd like to give it a try. (I would also like you to know that it took me waaaaay too much time and Googling to figure out how to embed a PDF and you probably won't be able to download it, but best of luck!)