Chores for a 7 year old

Two things change at seven, and both of them change what a chore can be.

The first is school. Year 2 and Year 3 bring homework, spellings, reading records - the first time a child has an obligation that follows them home. A household chore now competes with that, and a parent who ignores the collision gets a child who is genuinely overloaded rather than lazy.

The second is that a seven-year-old can hold two steps in their head. "Take your plate to the sink and rinse it" is now one instruction rather than two, and that unlocks most of the useful chores.

Chores a seven-year-old can do without you in the room

That last part is the point. At six you are beside them; at seven you can leave.

• Clearing and rinsing their own plate. The two-step one.
• Making their bed, if the standard is "duvet up, pillow at the top" and you have said out loud that this is the standard.
• Sorting washing into colours. Genuinely useful, genuinely a sorting game.
• Emptying small bins into the main one.
• Getting their own school bag ready, from a list on the wall. This is the highest-value chore at seven and almost nobody sets it, because it feels like the parent's job. It is the parent's job, which is why handing it over is worth so much.
• Feeding a pet from the bag, now that they can judge a portion.

What seven still cannot do reliably

• Anything that needs judging "clean enough". They will wipe the middle of the table and not the edges, every time, and it is not defiance - it is that the edges are not where they were looking.
• Remembering a weekly chore. Daily sticks at seven. Weekly does not, because seven days is longer than their sense of a week.
• Being trusted alone with anything breakable in quantity.

The collision with homework, and what to do about it

The families where this works do one of two things:

Move the chore to the morning. Before school, there is no homework competing, and a seven-year-old is a different person at 7.30am than at 5pm.

Or drop to weekdays-only. A chore that does not exist at the weekend is easier to keep than a chore that exists every day and gets skipped twice a week

• because a skipped chore teaches that the rule is negotiable, and two skips a week is a rule nobody believes.

Pocket money at seven

Seven is the age most UK families actually start. It is also the age the pocket money card companies open accounts, which is why it feels like the standard - but a card is a separate decision from money itself, and a seven-year-old spending in a shop with coins learns something a card cannot teach.

How much, and from what age covers the numbers.