Chore charts and pocket money sheets

Two sets, because families don’t agree about this

There’s a long running argument about whether children should be paid for jobs around the house, and it doesn’t have a winner. So there are two versions of each chart rather than one.

The teal sheets say helping out. Jobs are what everyone in the house does, nobody gets paid, and the chart is there to stop you asking four times.

The coral sheets say earning. Same jobs, but with a column for what each one is worth and a total at the bottom of the week.

You only need one of each pair. The group is printed on the sheet in words as well as colour, so a greyscale print still tells you which is which.

Which one suits your house

If your worry is that nothing gets done without nagging, the teal version is usually the better starting point. It keeps the focus on the job being done rather than on what it’s worth, and it avoids the conversation where a child asks what you’re paying before they’ll pick anything up.

If your worry is that your child has no idea what money is or where it comes from, the coral version does something the other one can’t. Seeing a week of jobs add up to a figure, and then watching that figure turn into a thing they wanted, is a lesson that’s hard to deliver any other way.

Plenty of families run both at once, which is why the job lists are identical. Everyday jobs on the teal chart, and the extra jobs block on the coral one for the bigger occasional things like washing the car.

Start with fewer jobs than you think

The commonest way to wreck one of these is to fill it in completely on day one.

A chart with four jobs that actually gets finished beats a chart with ten that never does. This matters most under about six, because a half filled chart reads as failure to a small child no matter how cheerfully you present it.

Every sheet prints ten jobs, which is deliberately more than any one child should be doing at once. Treat it as a menu rather than a list. Pick the three or four that matter in your house this month and ignore the rest, which is why the 3 to 5 sheet says so across the top.

If you want the longer version of why charts fail, it’s in reward charts that actually work, and most of it applies here.

The thing worth knowing about paying

If you do go down the coral route, the one trap to avoid is paying for everything.

Once every job has a price, the jobs without a price stop happening, and you’ve accidentally taught your child that unpaid help is for other people. Most families who make it work keep a short list of things that are simply expected, and attach money to the bigger or less pleasant jobs on top of that.

The charts are built for exactly that: a printed list of regular jobs, and a separate extra jobs block underneath.

The four jobs that carry a condition

Three kinds of job need an adult involved: heat at the cooker, sharp knives, and anything with a strong cleaner in it. They’re worth doing, and a ten year old who never touches any of them arrives at sixteen unable to feed themselves. So rather than leave them off, the 10 and up chart carries them with the condition printed underneath the job, where your child will actually read it.

Four rows have one. Loading the dishwasher says sharp things only once you are ready. Using the washing machine says after you have been shown how. Cleaning the bathroom sink says only with the spray you were given. Making a simple meal says with an adult, as agreed.

The 6 to 9 chart has two of the same kind, on measuring pet food and helping get food ready.

Those conditions are the part that matters, so if you write your own jobs in the blank rows, write the condition in too.

The pocket money sheet works either way

The tracker doesn’t care where the money came from. A flat weekly amount, a total earned off the coral chart, birthday money from a grandparent, it all goes in the same column.

What it’s really for is the bit underneath. A child who’s saving for something specific, with the cost written at the top and ten blocks to colour in as they get closer, will put money away in a way that the same child with a vague sense of saving never will.

Print a fresh copy each month rather than laminating this one, because the point is to be able to look back at it.