Laundry.
Very few people love doing laundry, but it has to get done. In our home, when you turn 7 you get a big privilege – your own (supervised) email account – and a big chore: laundry. Our 7 year olds (we’re on our third one) spend part of each Sunday gathering up our 3 baskets of laundry, sorting, washing, drying, carrying them back upstairs and then folding and putting away. When the next kid turns seven, you’re excused from all but the folding and putting away. Yes, of course they’ve asked what we’ll do when the littlest turns nine – I’m thinking of putting in coin-operated machines and letting each teen be on his own…
An eight year old can do laundry.
Yup. It takes a few months to really nail the skills to do this all with no help and few reminders. But by age 8, these boys each have it down. So imagine our surprise when one of the boys’ babysitters (a college sophomore) said, “Wow! I can’t even do laundry!” She said some schools do your laundry for free, though not the one she goes to now. Our kids were amazed and astounded. And I think she was pretty embarrassed.
The boys asked things like:
“What do you do when all your clothes are dirty?” “Did you know it’s not that hard?” “Doesn’t it feel like you’re a pretty little kid if you still give your clothes to your Mom to wash?” She said she didn’t know how, but she’d ask her mom to teach her over the summer. And that’s when our current eight year old thought it would be great to put a video on YouTube to teach college students. “So they don’t have to bug their Moms.” Warms my heart…
3 thoughts on “College Students and Laundry”
This is awesome – you are teaching your kids such valuable life skills. Not only how to wash clothes, but also how to speak and create a video!!! I hope lots of teens and college students watch this video and decide to take a stab at washing their own clothes! And we parents…. it’s time to have our kids wash the clothes!
Thank you Sharon! It’s hard to give this task up to our kids – they won’t do it as well, it will be more work to teach it and be patient than to just do it – but it’s the right thing for our kids!
The video is adorable.
When our son was in late junior high we had a neighbor teenager (just a year or two older than my son) helping me with the housework on the weekends. My son told me that he could do laundry better than the teenage helper and he would like to earn the money that she was earning. From thereon out he did the laundry and then soon learned how to iron.
When he went to college he earned a lot of extra money doing laundry and ironing, for his classmates. His classmates were in awe of his skills and I was so proud of him.
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