Years ago, it was the woman who was in charge of the housework 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, dedicated time to her children, to the cleaning, to the purchase and to the economic management of the marriage on many occasions.
Since the industrial revolution, where women also begin to work outside the home, a greater number of uncomfortable situations in housework begin to be generated. Fortunately, today, the vast majority of households formed by any couple, have assumed the distribution of tasks; even so, we may find it difficult to reach an agreement. If this is your case, in this Psychology-Online article we explain how to agree on household chores with your partner.
Index
- Members who live in the household
- Know the tasks to distribute
- Available time
- Take into account the free and personal time of each member
- Establish agreements
- Predisposition
- preferences
- Create a calendar or table
- set rewards
- change focus
Members who live in the household.
If you are wondering who should do the housework, you should know that it is important that, before of making the distribution of homework, 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. encourages the shared responsibility in children, this will make them learn to perform the tasks for when they are older.
Know the tasks to distribute.
How to share household chores with your partner? First, you must identify the activities and their timing. Either because some of them you will only do once a week and others daily, and perhaps others once a month or every two weeks; or because someone comes to help you with the cleaning of 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: pick up, sweep, mop, do the bathrooms, dust, wash the dishes in the morning and at night and clean the kitchen.
- Once a week: clean the glass, windows and doors, put washing machines
- Once a month: deep cleaning moving furniture, deep cleaning the kitchen once a month.
If you have animals, it would be important to include the tasks generated from their care, such as cleaning cages, pipi-cans, walking them, bathing them, combing them, etc.
Available time.
To avoid couple problems due to housework, you must know how much time each one has of the members who live in the home and with whom the distribution of tasks will have to be done, it will be useful for avoid overloading a person who hardly has time and free up another 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 that each member of the household has, it is important to also leave time for be able to enjoy freelytake into account others self-care activities staff, family activities or in a group of coexistence.
Cleaning activities at home will occupy part of our time, but not all of it, this will avoid possible problems with the couple due to housework. Therefore, it will be important to be able to predict or calculate approximately how long they will take us, in order to better adjust to something that we can comply with.
Establish agreements.
Once we know the household chores that we have to share, among whom we have to distribute, 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 chores or days.
Other agreements may make references to the type of utensils that we will use to perform the tasks. Perhaps you can consider changing the sweeping and mopping for a domestic robot to perform these tasks and free us.
Predisposition.
What is the predisposition of each one to carry out the tasks, or certain tasks in particular. There are people who like to clean more than others, or order/organize. Are we willing to "sacrifice" time doing homework? To what extent are we going to comply with what we have established? Do we want to see the house clean? In short, to really know how willing are we to do some or all of the household chores.
Preferences.
Another piece of advice on how to agree on household chores with your partner is to start by dividing up those cleaning activities at home that are preference for each person and leave the heaviest tasks, or those that nobody wants to do at first, for the end.
Create a calendar or table.
To avoid couple problems due to housework, it will be very useful for you to create a calendar or table with the tasks that we must do and who is going to do them. This will help you stick to agreements that you have agreed from the beginning.
When making it, you should keep in mind everything mentioned above about housework:
- What is the free time that each one wants to have.
- How much time will it take us to carry out the tasks.
- At what time of the day are we going to do them?
- What are the unforeseen events that may arise that cause us to be delayed or that we 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 immovable and that we can make a dynamic calendar where we all do all the tasks, let it rotate depending on the week or the month.
Set rewards.
Once we have the calendar set, we can agree on rewards collectively and/or individually as a nucleus of coexistence. These can be both to reward one of the cohabitants who has the most difficulty getting down to work with household chores, as well as to reward another who has shown greater dedication and effort.
In the end, the reward must be to meet the schedule and for doing all the tasks that you had marked in the beginning, this will make cleaning at home much less problematic.
Change focus.
Why do chores cause fights? This is because, normally, doing housework is considered tedious and boring. For this reason, making it entertaining and creating a fun moment for everyone will make it much easier and simpler, and even make us get the taste of carrying out the tasks.
For certain tasks, if not all, you can create a family moment, in 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 on how to agree on household chores with your partner, we recommend you read the following post about How to solve relationship problems.
This article is merely informative, in 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.
If you want to read more articles similar to How to agree on household chores with your partner, we recommend that you enter our category of Couple therapy.
Bibliography
Blanco, G., & Feldman, L. (2000). Responsibilities in the home and health of working women. Public health of Mexico, 42, 217-225.
Moreno, M. J. and Piqueras, C., (2020). Sanitary and domestic pandemic. The distribution of household chores in times of Covid-19. Social Science Journal, 26(4), 28-34.
Valenzuela, M. AND. F. (2004). Ergonomics applied to housework. Chilean Journal of Occupational Therapy, (4), 49-55.
