My teenagers will tell you that I'm not very good at being a 'mummy slave'; I don't see why I should be one and I believe it's not a bad plan to teach your children some basic domestic life skills from early on.
They, of course, will disagree, but they can both sort, wash, dry and iron their own clothes; they can both clean, tidy and vacuum the house (in record time if there's something else they really want to be doing) and both have a pretty impressive repertoire of recipes they can rustle up in the kitchen. Not bad for a 16 and 17-year-old, if you tune your ears out to the moaning that generally accompanies the performance of these activities.
If you would like your youngster to stop believing in the Laundry fairy and have them sort their own clothes ready for washing, then this very simple ParentHack I stumbled across is for you:
The laundry in my house is divided into four piles: colours, darks, whites and sheets (oh and towel; five piles)
Depending on how you divide your clothes will determine the permanent marker pens you need, but for my laundry I'd need: red and black.
Then I'd simply put a big red spot on the label of all my children's clothes that belong in the colours pile, and a black spot on the labels for dark pile things. If you do hot and cold loads, you could use red for hot and blue for cold.
Whichever colour system you use doesn't matter, what's important is that it's simple to understand.
I think this is super clever and you can read the original hack HERE.
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