Chores for an 8 year old

By eight, most children can physically do most household jobs. The washing up, the hoovering, the bins, folding, sweeping - none of it is beyond them.

Which is why eight is the age the arguments start.

Up to seven, a chore not done was usually a chore not remembered or not understood. At eight it is a decision. The child knew, could, and did not. That is a different problem and the tactics that worked at six make it worse.

What an eight-year-old can be trusted with alone

• Loading and unloading the dishwasher. Including the sorting.
• Hoovering one room. Not the house - one room, named.
• Taking bins out, if the bin is not heavier than they are.
• Making a simple breakfast - cereal, toast in a toaster.
• Folding and putting away their own washing.
• Walking a dog with an adult, and taking the lead on the flat bits.
• Being responsible for a weekly job, which is new. Eight is roughly when a week becomes a real unit of time rather than an abstraction.

The reliability problem, and the thing that actually fixes it

Eight-year-olds do chores unevenly. Brilliant for nine days, nothing on the tenth, indignant when you mention it.

The instinct is to add consequences. What works better is to make the completion visible - not to you, to them. A child who can see that they did the thing eight days running behaves differently about day nine than a child who only ever hears about the day they missed.

That is the whole psychology behind streaks, stickers, points and every chart that has ever worked: not the reward, the record. The reward is what people notice; the record is what does the work.

It is also why the charts fail - a chart records the days you filled it in, and a parent who stops filling it in has deleted the evidence. When a reward chart stops working is about exactly that failure.

What changes about how you ask

At six you instruct. At eight you had better have a reason, because an eight-year-old will ask for one and "because I said so" starts costing you something.

The reason that holds up is not fairness ("everyone does jobs") - it is capability ("you can do this now, and I am not going to keep doing it for you"). Children respond to being trusted with something more than to being enlisted into a rota.

Should it be paid at eight?

This is the age the question actually arrives, because it is the age the child asks it. There is a real argument on both sides and it is worth having a position rather than improvising when asked: should you pay children for chores.