Final Project "A Clean Bathroom"
For this project I want to come up with a solution to encourage my kids to keep their bathroom clean on a regular basis. I want to accomplish this with out having to constantly tell them to do so.
Instead of just jumping in to this project I have come up with a small list of ideas, and I hope that at least one of them will work. As I go I may need to change or tweak each idea to improve it. Here are some of the things that I will be trying.
|
Before I started this project I thought of things that I might need for this to be successful, things like rewards, consequences, time, patience, empathy, a white board, dry erase markers, and cleaning supplies.
Some issues that I may come across are things like: my kids not caring if they do or don't get to play video game or eat sweets, one kid does all the work and the other does nothing, or me not constantly keeping them on a routine. |
For my first attempt I sat my kids down and explained to them that keeping the bathroom clean is important for many reason. I told them that when the bathroom is dirty it could begin to smell, it looks gross, and it could get them sick. I also explained to them that when it is dirty, it is embarrassing when we have company over and they have to use the bathroom.
Once I told them the why, I had them come with me to the bathroom and I showed them what things we wanted them to clean. I also showed them the process in which they need to clean the bathroom, as well as what cleaning supplies they needed to use.
This attempt worked extremely well, for about two days. For these two days my wife and I did not have to ask them to clean the bathroom one time, they did this on their own. Then they began to fall into their old habits, so I had to remind them to keep up the work. They cleaned the bathroom for another day, then the excuses and fits started to poor in. Some of the excuses that I received from them were things like, "I didn't know I had to", "I don't know how", and my favorite "He isn't helping me, so I'm not going to do it either".
This cycle continued for the next week, so I put this option in the fail bucket. I hoped that I didn't have to bribe them with rewords or threaten them with consequences, but this is the next step I planned to take.
For my next attempt at fixing my problem I decided to implement consequences for not keeping the bathroom clean. To the right I have listed the consequences that decided to give my kids each time I found the bathroom a mess.
|
|
With this attempt I I quickly found a flaw in this process, I noticed that the older brother was the one that was always cleaning. Although the bathroom was getting cleaned, it was not a success in my book. I wanted both kids to get in the habit of cleaning the bathroom.
To try and fix this problem I decided that I will be checking the bathroom twice a day, in the morning and in the evening. I assigned the younger brother to the morning check and the older brother to the evening check. This process was working pretty good for about 8 days, I only had to remind them a couple of times. Then they began to decide that the consequences were not that bad, and they preferred to be punished instead of cleaning. At this point I was getting frustrated because my ideas at solving the problem seem to start of good but then only last a week or so. |
Although I was frustrated I was not going to give up on this attempt quit yet. I decided instead of making each of them responsible for the entire bathroom, I would make them each responsible for half of the tasks when cleaning the bathroom. I thought that this may make it seem easier. |
List of tasks to complete
|
This idea also work only for a short time. Although I feel I have made some progress, I feel like my kids may not be motivated by consequences. I hope they are better motivated by rewards because this will be what will drive my next attempt. Please see my next blog post, Blog #6, for my continued efforts in successfully fixing my problem of gaining a clean bathroom.