How to Successfully Delegate Family Responsibilities

(589 Words)
Family life can be more harmonious if responsibilities are delegated successfully. To do so, they must be fair and as accommodating to everyone. The following tips can help you complete this task.
Decide on all of the family responsibilities
It is difficult to fairly delegate family responsibilities if you are just spreading them out as they come along. You may mistakenly give one person too much or too little without even realizing it. As much as possible, you want to lay out all of the responsibilities such as cleaning, dishes, laundry, pet responsibilities, and everything else. Obviously there are tasks for which you cannot plan or which will emerge once in a while such as cleaning up after a party, but as much as possible, know what you have to do.
Have a family meeting
Instead of just making the decision on your own as a parent as to who will do what, you may want to make it with a family meeting. You could make this a monthly event so that tasks and chores can be changed as the needs of the family and its members changes. You can have a poster board or computer where all of the tasks are listed. Obviously some tasks will be more difficult or desirable than others, so you do not want to just make it that everyone has to do five tasks and that is it. You want to make sure that everyone gets their fair share of desirable and undesirable tasks.
When you are delegating the tasks during your meeting, make sure that you first decide who is eligible for what task. For instance, you would not send your three year old to bring out the trash all by himself, which you may need to explain to your ten year old. Sometimes the older or bigger ones will need to do something because they can physically handle it.
You can then find out if anyone really wants to do a chore that no one else wants to do. For instance, someone may love to walk the dog whereas another family members might think of it as a hassle. Obviously it makes sense that the person who loves it always has that job.
There are many different ways that you can delegate the family responsibilities. One idea is ask for people to volunteer for the chores. You can ask the first family member to pick a responsibility to sign up for, and then the next person. When everyone has signed up for one chore then you can go back to the first person and they can sign up for the next chore. You can do this until everything is done. In this way, everyone should have a mix of desirable and less desirable chores.
Another way is to have people randomly pick chores. You can put papers with the most desirable chores in one bag, medium ones in another, and less desirable in another. They can then each pick a certain amount from each bag.
Another idea is to have the chores rotate. This may be the most fair if you have some chores that everyone truly hates such as cleaning the bathroom. Everyone gets a mix of chores and then these are changed weekly or monthly.
If someone is very unhappy with their family responsibilities, then you can schedule an emergency family meeting to deal with it.
When family responsibilities are delegated fairly, then there will be less strife and competition. The above methods can help you with this process.