Years ago, it was the woman who was in charge of household chores without this generating much commotion or disagreement within the couple. The man was the one who went out to work outside the home, and the woman, without working for anyone outside the home, dedicated time to her children, cleaning, shopping, and the financial management of the marriage on many occasions.
Since the industrial revolution, where women also began to work outside the home, a greater number of uncomfortable situations began to arise in household chores. Fortunately, today, the vast majority of households formed by any couple have assumed the distribution of tasks; Even so, we may encounter difficulties in reaching an agreement. If this is your case, in this Psychology-Online article we explain how to agree on household chores with your partner.
Members living in the household
If you are wondering who should do the household chores, you should know that it is important that, before distributing the chores, we take into account all the people who live in the home, since It is important that all members participate to create a better environment.
Even if there are small children, it is also important that they participate in household chores. Promotes the shared responsibility in childrenthis will make them learn to do tasks when they are older.
Know the tasks to be distributed
How to divide household chores with your partner? First, you must identify the activities and their timing. Either because you will only do some of them once a week and others daily, and perhaps others once a month or every two weeks; or because someone comes to help you with cleaning the home every X days, it is important to know what tasks are what you are going to do and how often do you want to do them.
An example could be:
- Daily: picking up, sweeping, mopping, bathing, dusting, washing dishes in the morning and evening, and cleaning the kitchen.
- Once a week: clean the glass, windows and doors, put on washing machines
- Once a month: thorough cleaning by moving furniture, clean the kitchen thoroughly once a month.
If you have animals, it would be important to include the tasks that arise from their care such as cleaning cages, pee-cans, walking them, bathing them, combing them, etc.
Available time
To avoid couple problems due to household chores, you must know the amount of time each of the members who live in the home have and with whom they will have to distribute tasks, it will help us to avoid overloading a person who barely has time and leave free someone who has more time.
Take into account the free and personal time of each member
When we talked in the previous section about the free time available to each member of the household, it is important to also leave time for to be able to freely enjoytake into account other personal, family or community activities.
Cleaning activities at home will take up part of our time, but not all of it, this will avoid possible relationship problems due to household chores. So it will be important to be able to predict or calculate approximately how long they will take, in order to better adjust to something that we can accomplish.
Establish agreements
Once we know the household tasks that we have to divide up, who we have to divide them among, and the time available to each one, we can reach important agreements between us such as, for example, hire someone to help us with certain household tasks or days.
Other agreements may make references to the type of utensils we will use to perform tasks. Perhaps you can consider changing sweeping and scrubbing for a home robot May he perform these tasks and free us.
Predisposition
What is each person’s predisposition to carry out tasks, or certain specific tasks. There are people who like to clean more than others, or organize/organize. Are we willing to “sacrifice” time doing tasks? To what extent are we going to comply with what we have established? Do we want to see the house clean? In short, really knowing how willing we are to do all or some of the household chores.
preferences
Another tip on how to agree on household chores with your partner is to start distributing those cleaning activities at home that are preference for each person and leave the heaviest tasks, or those that no one wants to do at first, for last.
Create a calendar or table
To avoid relationship problems due to household chores, it will be very useful for you to create a calendar or table with the tasks we must perform and who is going to perform them. This It will help you continue with the agreements that you have agreed upon from the beginning.
When preparing it, you should keep in mind everything mentioned above about housework:
- What is the free time that each person wants to have?
- How much time it will take us to complete the tasks.
- At what time of day are we going to do them.
- What are the unforeseen events that may arise that cause us to be delayed or have to leave a task for another time; so it’s okay to leave a space, a margin for these.
It is important to mention that the calendar does not have to be fixed and that we can make a dynamic calendar where we all do all the tasks, let it rotate depending on the week or month.
Set rewards
Once we have the calendar set, we can agree on rewards collectively and/or individually as a core of coexistence. These can be either to reward one of the cohabitants who finds it more difficult to get down to work with household chores, or to reward another who has shown greater dedication and effort.
In the end, the reward must be to meet the schedule and by carrying out all the tasks that you had initially set, this will make cleaning at home much less problematic.
Change focus
Why do tasks cause fights? This is because, normally, doing housework is considered tedious and boring. Therefore, making it entertaining and creating a fun moment for everyone will make it much easier and simpler, and we will even get a taste for doing tasks.
For certain tasks, if not all, you can create a family momentin a group, in which you can take the opportunity to get to know each other better, tell stories, dance, sing and let your creativity fly while you clean your home.
If you liked this article about how to agree on household chores with your partner, we recommend you read the following post about .
This article is merely informative, at Psychology-Online we do not have the power to make a diagnosis or recommend a treatment. We invite you to go to a psychologist to treat your particular case.
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Bibliography
Blanco, G., & Feldman, L. (2000). Home responsibilities and health of working women. Public Health of Mexico, 42, 217-225.
Moreno, MJ and Piqueras, C., (2020). Health and domestic pandemic. The distribution of household tasks in times of Covid-19. Journal of Social Sciences, 26(4), 28-34.
Valenzuela, MEF (2004). Ergonomics applied to household tasks. Chilean Journal of Occupational Therapy, (4), 49-55.