Review of Everyday Homemaking's The Everyday Family Chore System

Why are family chores such a sore subject in my household? It's not like there are that many of them! There are dishes and floors. The dog enjoys a meal now and then. Laundry has to be folded. That's about it, though! We are solid suburbanites. No farm. No animals (apart from said dog). Nothing complicated. To hear my kids complain, though, you would swear that we were pioneers having to do everything on our own land. It's disheartening. For that reason, I was intrigued when I saw Everyday Homemaking's The Everyday Family Chore System. 


More than just a Family Chore System, this ebook is a child training system. In fact, author Vicki Bentley makes the point explicitly that child training is the first step toward home management. That's Part One of her book!  

As you can see, it is only in Part Three that Vicki moves into the actual chore system itself. That's the best thing about this book: it's far more than just a set of chore charts that you can find somewhere on the Internet. You're actually getting great information and help with your purchase. 

Having said that, if you're past the stages of Parts One and Two (and if your kids are as old as mine, those ships have pretty much sailed...mine are 16, 14, 12, and 12), you still get so much bang for your buck with this book! Vicki gives you so many different ideas for how to assign, or divvy up chores. Sometimes what your family really needs is just a new way to refresh the whole process. Sometimes you just need to streamline it. Reading this book made me realize that. 

For Vicki's system (after considering her four basic principles introduced at the beginning of the book), the most important starting point is the non-negotiable chores. I laid those out at the beginning of this post. These get divided up daily and weekly among the children living at home. I was already doing this, but the great thing about reading this book was realizing that I was not doing this in the most efficacious way possible. By utilizing Vicki's simple chore chart rotation method, these chores can be shared more equitably among my children. It sounded so simple once I read it, but for some reason, I had gotten so stuck on having some chores assigned to some children almost in perpetuity. Adding in the extra jobs using the "Job-From-Box" method takes care of the non-negotiables and makes for wonderful disciplinary actions (which my kids far prefer over losing their devices).

There is obviously far more to Vicki's system (see the length of Part Three in the TOC above), but the nuts-and-bolts are pretty simple (which is not to say the book isn't worth it - I am so glad I had the chance to read it. I *needed* it for my teens, and I would have gotten even more out of it had my kids been much younger!), meaning anyone can implement the method and see nearly instantaneous results. This is not a system that will take you eons to set up. This is not some Japanese life simplification process. This is a chore system that will probably have you hearing less of, "Why do I have to do all the work around here? It's not fair!" That makes The Everyday Family Chore System a winner in my world.

If you'd like to check out The Everyday Family Chore System (or Vicki's other book, Everyday Cooking) either in print or ebook format, for yourself, she is currently offering Homeschool Review Crew blog readers a coupon code! Using the code TOS10books will get you 10% off either or both of her books until 9/5/17! If you need to do more research first, be sure to click the banner below to read more great reviews.