The Perpetual Housework Cycle

As Winter slowly fizzles out and signs of Spring are popping up throughout Idaho, many of us are thinking of starting Spring Cleaning. I thought you all may enjoy this article written by a homeschooling friend of mine on The Perpetual Housework Cycle.

The Perpetual Housework Cycle: Practical advice for juggling housework and homeschooling

By Wendy Roberts

Disclaimer: The author in no way claims to have a clean house and confesses that at anytime her house could be engulfed in complete and utter chaos. Her only qualification for writing this article is she has cleaned every mess a child under 13 can make for 13 years.

“Housework, if you do it right, will kill you.” Erma Bombeck
“Housework done wrong still blesses your family.” FLYlady

It is a challenge to many homeschoolers to juggle the work of homemaking with the work of homeschooling. Having our children home all the time makes our house cleaning needs different then others.
Popular house cleaning ideas assume that children will leave the house for 4-8 hours during the day. So children will not be changing clothes, playing with toys, or eating in the home for a few hours each day. As homeschoolers this is not the case. Our children are always home doing the things children do best which regularly ends in chaos.

After 13 years of motherhood and seven years homeschooling I have finally found peace. Struggling with the continuous chaos and work I realized that homemaking is a Perpetual Housework Cycle or PHC. The PHC is the rotation of chaos-work-clean-use-chaos-work-clean-use. The more in your family and younger they are the faster and more furious this cycle spins.
It is ridiculous to say “Here is the perfect dinner. Now dinner is done and we will never eat again.” (Even the day after Thanksgiving we eat again.) It is also ridiculous to say “Here is the perfectly clean kitchen, now it is done and I will never have to clean it again.”

Here are 5 lessons about housework:

1. Clean 1 hour everyday before dad gets home.

My Mothers house cleaning advice has always been “I would clean the house for 1 hour everyday and then bundle the children up and leave the house so it would stay clean.”
One hour is the magic number in my house. One hour every day it is enough, but not so much that I feel like a martyr when someone spills or makes a new mess. And each day I get a little farther into the organizing and sorting that piles up.

One hours worth of cleaning before dad comes home is a deadline without which housework might be procrastinated forever. It makes dinner time more pleasant for me, I am not worrying about the house. I feel better about myself as a wife, mother and homemaker. My husband is happier coming home to a clean house rather then chaos.

If you have children about 7 and up they are old enough to really add to your ability to get things clean. I have 3 children over 7 and so each day that they help me we actually get 4 hours of work done for my 1 hour.

2. Your house work is never done so it is never to late to do it.

House cleaning is never done. It is always waiting to be done again or more thoroughly. The thought that house work is never done used to be very depressing to me until I realized it was a cycle. It is never “too late” to start cleaning a mess that is bugging you. I don’t mean you should stay up cleaning until all hours of the night trying to get it done, because it won‘t. It will wait for us to have enough energy to do it.

Looking at house work as a cycle has helped me realize that although my work will be undone in only a few minutes under my children’s active and creative care, that doesn’t mean my work was in vain. The cleaner it was to begin with the easier it will be to clean up again and thus the farther from Chaos we are.

3. Never clean so well that you or your children can’t live at home anymore

I have to watch myself that I don’t tell my children by word or action “Don’t live here I just cleaned”. We have to be careful that we keep our home a place where we all feel comfortable and that cleaning is only to increase that comfort. When we become obsessive about cleanliness we are actually contradicting the whole purpose of cleaning, Which is to make our home warm, loving and comfortable for those we love and ourselves.

An example of this happened when I was a child. We got new carpet in our home. My brother came in the house with mud on his feet and walked on the new carpet. My mom horrified said “Don’t walk on the new carpet”

My brother laughed and said “ Ok, mom we won’t walk on the carpet”
My mom laughed with him realizing that the purpose of carpet is to be walked on. And said “Take off your shoes.”

The carpet wasn’t more important then my brother but he also needed to be responsible to help keep it nice for everyone.

4. Clean the play areas first.

I used to start cleaning in the guest areas of our home. I would run out of energy for the play areas of our home. It seemed that this was a good idea because the play area would become messy so fast that my work would be in vain.

Cleaning the play area first buys peaceful play. Children love to make a mess but don’t like to play there. They will stay in the play room for hours once it is clean.

If I haven’t cleaned their play areas for too long then they will infiltrate my guest areas with their play to get out of the chaos.
 
5. Have everyone help

“Train your children to work. I believe in the gospel of work. Train them to assume responsibility. Provide opportunity for service to one another and to their parents. Chores are blessings in overalls. Their value remains long after the duty is done.”

A. Theodore Tuttle Conference Report, April 1970, p. 87
We must enlist our children in our cleaning efforts. Without them “busily engaged in a good cause” we are bailing the ocean while the dam continues to break.

Working children are not off making a mess some where else. Anyone who has been cleaning the bath room and found their toddler in the kitchen fingerpainting with honey, oil, eggs or syrup-hopefully not all at once-yes, I have found a toddler in each one of these circumstances- will soon be sold on recruiting even the littlest in your cleaning.

How do you do it? Habit is the key to enlisting your children’s help. If you are a sporadic cleaner then expect a fight every time. I have found that the first day I make them do 1 hour it is like pulling teeth. There are 2 reasons for this:

• the house is a mess and their jobs are harder.
• they are out of the habit and think maybe they can weasel out of it.

The second day in a row that they do their hour it is easier because they did their job yesterday and so they are able to pick up that days layer of chaos in a much shorter time and go on to other jobs, they are also getting used to the expectation and so fight me less about helping. The third day there is no fight. We all just get the work done and there is very little effort from me as far as making them do it or following up on them. It reverts to a war zone if I let them off and try to start it up again.


Although house cleaning with a house full of home schooled children can be overwhelming we need to remember that our children are our greatest treasure. The precious little time we get with them will be over all too soon. Our housework won’t be done until our children are grown and gone. But just as we will miss them, we will surely miss the messes they made. It will be all too quiet and clean. We’ll have to invite the grandkids over to help us feel at home once again.

Other Resources for homemaking:

http://www.juliemorgenstern.com/ My favorite book by her is “Organizing from the inside out.”
http://www.cleanreport.com/ Don Aslett has some great ideas for simplifying cleaning.
http://www.flylady.com/ FLY stands for Finally Loving Yourself. This is a great resource for the homeschooling mother of many
http://www.noblechild.com/index_kitchen.html Cheri Logans website a fellow homeschool mom of 10 children shares great tips and ideas that work in their family.

Wendy Roberts is the homeschooling mother of seven. The Roberts family has been homeschooling for 7 years from Atlantic to Pacific. Their most recent adventures in learning include Juggling, a field trip to Death Valley, and Chinese New year. You can join her yahoo group for homeschooling a large family at: http://groups.yahoo.com/group/homeschoolingahouseful/