Kids Do Their Chores with the Ticket Method Reward System

Do your kids fight doing chores? Are you overwhelmed with housework? Do you do it all yourself because it is a struggle to get them to help? In our household, we have developed a reward system for doing chores that gets the kids volunteering to do extra work while at the same time, helps reduce sibling rivalry and battles over whose turn it is for what special treat.

Here's how it works. Buy a roll of tickets at your local department store. These tickets are not expensive and don't need to be the two part kind. Take an empty tissue box (we use one of those pretty oval, holographic ones) and a marker (we have one in a different color for each child but that really isn't necessary; my kids just think it is fun!) and set them somewhere easily accessible along with the tickets.

Tell your kids that you aren't going to make them do chores, but every time they help out around the house, you will give them a ticket. They should write their name on it and put it in the box. There will be drawings for rewards at a future time. If your kids are young, you might have to explain what a drawing is. Tell them that you will be mixing up the tickets and then randomly pulling one out. Whoever it belongs to will get the reward. If you do more chores, you will have a better chance of winning the reward. My kids had several questions about how it would work and yours might too. I explained a bit about what kinds of rewards we would be having (trips out when we can only bring one kid, art supplies, food treats when there is only one, etc.) They also wanted to know if we would be getting rid of the tickets after each drawing, and I explained that no, they would all stay in there except the one we drew which would be torn up and thrown out.

I recommend keeping ticket chores about even, things that take about ten minutes work well for us. If a chore is going to take a lot longer, I might offer two or even three tickets. Of course, some one ticket chores end up taking a lot longer than ten minutes because of dawdling. That is why we always tell how many tickets the chore is worth upfront. That way procrastinating isn't encouraged. We don't offer tickets for things like cleaning up after yourself because that is just your responsibility unless there are extenuating circumstances. We don't force anyone to do chores. If I would like someone to dry the dishes for me, I offer it to whoever seems most available, and if he or she turns me down, I offer it to someone else. Sometimes everyone is busy, and I end up doing it myself, but that is OK. I try to keep a cheerful attitude to set a good example about the task myself.

We use to do drawings pretty infrequently, basically when something came up. (Mostly for trips out because we do a lot of things that we don't mind bringing one child to, but we just can't bring everyone.) There are a lot of tickets in the bin now so we do a drawing almost everyday. (We don't promise that we will though. The adults are in charge of when we will have a drawing, and we discourage asking.) We keep a small basket with some rewards in it, things our kids like, which will vary by family. Everything is basically worth a dollar or less though. When we do a daily drawing, the winner gets to pick something from the basket. My kids enjoy the anticipation, and they don't get jealous when they don't win.

This method has also taught them about probability. Everyone knows that there is one kids who does more chores than anyone else because she is more willing to volunteer, and sure enough, she wins the drawings more than half the time. Not winning definitely encourages the others to work, and they now frequently ask me if there is anything they can do around the house to help out.