Radical Christian Unschooling

I recently had a conversation with another homeschooling mom who wanted to know about how to get their children to do housecleaning and pick up after themselves without prompting from the mom. The children are happy to help when asked, but don’t initiate cleaning up on their own. The mom was frustrated and bugged by the lack of intrinsic motivation in her kids to clean.

My thoughts:

I don’t think, until the stuff is really theirs and they care about it, will it become important to the kids.

You know, my mom had very high standards, and forced me to clean my room and help around the house, and help in the yardwork. If my mom found a bread crumb on my floor, I would come home from school to find the contents of every drawer and closet in my room (I had two, one for clothes and one for toys/junk), and my school desk, all piled on top of my bed. I was told I wasn’t going to bed until it was clean. It didn’t make me a better cleaner, or better at taking care of the yard, either. My yard looks horrible to this day. Oh, we mow it, and trim the bushes once in a while, but I don’t care for it.

I think it isn’t until it becomes important to the individual they just won’t see it, and we can’t *make* it important to anyone else. Modeling responsibility, asking for help when you need it, and realizing that it is your own standard and not theirs is all you can do. It is up to the Holy Spirit to impart that cleaning conviction into their hearts. Honestly, I don’t think you can *make* them care. You can *make* them clean, but the damage that does to your relationship with them isn’t really worth it.

Here’s the thing I learned from Sandra Dodd about this subject: Being frustrated, bugged, upset, annoyed, or angry about it is a choice you make. You can choose to look at the stack of dishes in the sink and have dark thoughts about the thoughtlessness of your family, or you can look at the dishes and remember what fun everyone had laughing around the table and how good the food was, and how wonderful you can stand at your sink and wash your dishes and look out into the backyard at the children playing there.

What if you think of the cleaning as another part of your job as an unschooling mom, to make the house clean and inviting, making sure that craft supplies and art supplies are kept well stocked and accessible, and cleaning up after they are done is your opportunity to reflect on what they have been learning and doing?

You know how after you have had a party at your house, the guests aren’t there to clean up, but you go around picking up the paper plates and cups and seeing the 1/2 eaten cake and the huge collection of bottles and cans in the recycling bin, and you have that satisfaction of having had a great time and giving the gift of a great time to your friends? Do you feel resentment at your friends for leaving a mess for you? Or do you feel grateful that you have friends and can’t wait until the next opportunity to have them over?

Now transfer that attitude to your home. Your job is to provide *and maintain* as cool and rich and interesting an environment for learning as you can for your kids. Look at the bits of yarn and paper and fabric and paint blobs and half-created things as a snapshot of unschooling. Think about what they were working on, how they were learning, their laughter and fun and discovery, and how they didn’t clean up because they were running out the door to look for the neighbor’s lost kitten…

As you wash their clothes think about how they got so dirty at the park because they were exploring the creek. When you trip over their jeans on the floor think about how they spent all day out building a fort in the backyard and had to hurry to change clothes for Grandma’s birthday dinner, and what wonderful hugs they gave her.

Of course it is perfectly okay to ask for help when you need it. And if it is given willingly and cheerfully, be very grateful!

And also see if you can free them as much as possible from expectations of orderliness and cleaning so that they can be free to learn and discover and grow. Watch what they are doing, and consider what you would be taking them away from, to come help you clean the living room.

I learned to care for my home by having my own home, not by all the nagging and punishing and chores my parents made me do. I learned to use cleaning supplies by reading the bottles, because you can be sure they had changed a lot by the time I was grown. Like every other aspect of unschooling, when it becomes important to us, then we learn and remember and use that knowledge.