Chores

For thos with larger families  say  5 plus kids.
What Chores do you and your spouse do, and how much time do you spend at each chore?

I am going to chime even though we didn't have 5 kids.

Usually, I was in charge of the stuff inside the house.

Dear hubby took out the trash and was in charge of the outside stuff.

The kids usually took care of their rooms and when old enough their laundry.

Outside the kids helped their dad feed the animals and take care of the mowing when they were old enough.

How do you handle this at your house?

Anne Miller wrote:I am going to chime even though we didn't have 5 kids.

Usually, I was in charge of the stuff inside the house.

Dear hubby took out the trash and was in charge of the outside stuff.

The kids usually took care of their rooms and when old enough their laundry.

Outside the kids helped their dad feed the animals and take care of the mowing when they were old enough.

How do you handle this at your house?

My wife and I have different view points on the homesteading life.  
So it leads to alot of conflict.  She believes that it is something to do when you retire and you lots of free time.
So were not really handling it too well.  

Dear hubby and I never talked about homesteading until we moved to the farm

We were happy city dwellers with commitments to family and friends so we stayed pretty busy.

Then one day our son came running into the house saying `they got her`.

The end of the story is that we found out that a girl about 12 yrs burned our 5-year-old daughter's hand with the lighter out of their car.

We put the house on the market and bought the farm.

When folks have kids their lives can change in a split second.

My opinion, I'd rather raise my kids on a homestead rather than moving there when they're grown. There's so much they can learn and experience on a homestead. But if you're having to learn lots about homesteading at the same time, I could see it also being very stressful.
Do you and your wife work outside the home? Is she possibly overwhelmed with the requirements of multiple kids that she can't imagine adding something more?

I don't have 5+ kids, so my answer may not be helpful to you. I'm a stay-at-home mom, and my husband works outside the home. He recognizes that raising a child is a full-time job, so all of the household stuff does not fall completely on me. He does most of the grocery shopping and errands while he's out with work. He does about 75% of the dish washing, cuts all of the grass, and cleans some of the house. I do most of the laundry, the gardening, about 75% of the cooking, and most of the daily tasks/decisions with teaching our daughter. If we got animals (besides the dog we currently have), it's clear that I'd be the one taking care of the animals.

We believe our daughter is to participate in home maintenance and learn how to manage a home. At a very young age, she started learning how to cook, clean, etc. and does many of the household things alongside me. If there are particular tasks that she hates related to the homestead, I'm not going to make her do them. There are certain things my husband and I don't like to do, which is why the other one does it. It does take extra time to teach household tasks to my daughter, so I don't get nearly as much done, but I'm counting on it taking less time when she can take over and do them herself.

Nikki, brings up a great point about raising kids on a homestead.

The best thing we ever did for our kids was move to the farm.

My kids got a much better education than they would have gotten in the city.

Dear hubby and I still had jobs when we moved.

I don't know how my kids would have turned out if we had not made that move.

Our daughter fell in love with all the farm animals and made her career after college in the veterinarian industry.

To me, moving to the farm or homestead is more for the younger crowd rather than for retirees.

We traveled for a few years after selling the homestead then when we retired we bought a place in the country near where our daughter lived.

Marc Siegel wrote: My wife and I have different view points on the homesteading life.  
So it leads to a lot of conflict.  She believes that it is something to do when you retire and you lots of free time.
So were not really handling it too well.  

1. Age of children?  My 2 1/2 year old knew how to sort and put away the cutlery from the dishwasher. His 5 year old brother was old enough to put the rest of the dishes away. As Nikki says, it takes time to train kids, but most kids these days don't help as much as kids do in rural/foreign countries. I've read that in areas of the world, a 5 year old boy is expected to manage a herd of goats for grazing. But those parents wouldn't be off working for others where the kids can't access their help. I've also read at least once, that children liked going to school because it was much easier than being full-time farm workers.

2. Are you and your wife working, and if so, how many hours?

3. Families used to have "family support"  or "community support" like parents living in the same home. North Americans tend to be too isolated, which makes the stress of child-rearing much greater than when "communities" raised children. Look at hunter-gatherer societies as an example. Is your wife simply stressed out from child-rearing? The expectations on parents are *much*  higher than they were 3 decades ago, and I thought they were over-blown then.

4. What kind of children do you have? My eldest didn't bounce, he ricocheted! People who had "easy" kids just didn't get it.  Many thought I was a lousy parent until they were in a position of having to deal with a similar child. Some kids are simply harder to raise, and if you've got one or more like that, it is *very* difficult to find a way to focus and direct the child, without actually making the long term outcome worse. If you and your wife have different parenting styles also, that can create both more conflict, and an increase in the feeling of isolation.

5. What does your homesteading life look like? Are there a lot of things that *have* to happen daily? Are you set up to be able to get critical things done efficiently, or does it constantly feel like things are a bigger struggle than they need to be? Are you trying to build the homestead, or are you maintaining an existing homestead?

Marc, for what it's worth, trying to get a spouse to be on the same page when things go from urban to rural, it's not easy.

The starter place is you two need to be agreeing about things, regardless of how many kids, for your own sakes because you want to celebrate the amazing accomplishments of a rural life together, but also because kids are really good at playing their parents against each other when they see the parents don't agree.  Throw in some teenage hormones and you two have to hold the line together.

If sitting down and listing specific things, trying to make compromises doesn't work, counseling might be a good idea so everyone can voice their opinions, ideas and expectations in a situation where there's a neutral referee.

As far as actually doing chores, not long ago I ran across a YouTube video where the person said they were "relaxing" by doing chores. The repetition is relaxing, Being Here Now is relaxing, the end result is a relief.   Honestly never occurred to me that that was an option, so I try to think of them in those terms.  After all, I signed up for this stuff....

I watch a lot of reality TV and the spouse not agreeing on the same subject comes up a lot.

My advice would be to try to make the wording agree if you love your spouse.

Use breadcrumbs to sway the spouse to the direction wanted or to slowly agree with the spouse.

This is all about love.