Delegation and Parenting

I am a big believer in delegating to my children. It helps me, and I genuinely believe it allows them to become responsible, independent adults.

Many of the skills and techniques we use when delegating at our jobs can be directly translated to empowering kids.

Make sure they can do the task.

Whatever you ask your children to do, make sure that your child can do the task. Little kids cannot be expected to do the same jobs as teenagers.

When my kids were little, they started taking their dishes to the sink once they had finished eating. Now that they are teenagers, they still take their dishes to the kitchen, but now the expectation is that they rinse their own dishes at a minimum. We also take our turns to wash, dry and put away the dishes.

Our kids started out by helping with tasks first, then as they grow and mature, you explain how to take on more. Then you supervise them until you are confident they can safely do the task.

Set clear expectations

When I was working on getting my children to wash up, they both played the “do the job badly, and mum will take over card”. If this happened, I would stop myself and make sure they were doing the job. IF they did it poorly, I would make them redo it. I found this helped to eliminate that behaviour from occurring too often.

Make sure that your kids understand what the finished task looks like. That way, they don’t have any excuses. Kids will always try to get away with the minimum (same as many adults). You may have to repeat tasks many times before they do them correctly.

Take time to follow-up

When you are delegating, make sure you follow-up. Firstly to make sure the job was done. Then that the job was done correctly. I like to check-in with my kids to see if they had any difficulty with any aspect of it. This allows them to share if they found anything hard or complicated.

Remember they are kids, and it is your job to help them grow — if you don’t show them, you can’t expect them to know something.

Be consistent

Related posts:

Let me start by defining what I mean by “audiophile quality music”— it’s music with distinct highs and lows, with enough detail so that I can tell apart the different instruments and appreciate the…

Recent discussion about scary dogs triggered a memory of the two scariest dogs I ever knew, back in my morning newspaper delivery days. I was about ten when this tale unfolded. How well I can still…

What can machine learning and A.I. learn from lessons already learnt in other fields? I would happily assert that a great deal more could be transferred from the lessons learnt in the development of…