Dishes!! How We Organize Our Children and Efficiently Clean Up After Meals.

Dishes never end!! Cleaning up after every meal can be very time-consuming and easily overwhelming, especially in a large family. But it doesn’t have to be. Here, I share how we have been tackling this job for well over 10 years!

When I was younger and had 3-4 kids, I would have the children help me with meal cleanup. I always cleaned up after every meal because I just couldn’t stand the chaos a counter full of dirty dishes created in our home, especially when I would first wake up in the morning.

Teaching Them How To Do It

Having the children help not only normalizes this ‘chore’ but also teaches them how I like things done. There is no question about how much soap to use or which side of the sink the soapy water goes in. They’ve learned through doing it with me, or now, with an older sibling.

Now, this doesn’t mean that they aren’t going to use too much soap or leave food on the dishes, of course. But it does mean that they are more likely to know what I expect.

In this video, I share what prompted me and my husband to set up our current system, why we set it up this way, plus how we have been able to get the teams (spoiler alert!) to work together.

I wasn’t originally planning on including the following video with this post but it does share our kids doing dishes, although this was four years ago! The video is filled with a ton of singing and ends with a chicken trying to get into the house through our front screened window! Every day is an adventure! <3

What has helped your family get an efficient method for meal cleanup? Is getting dishes cleaned up after every meal important to you and your household? Share with me how you do things!

Interested in how we deal with the regular chores around our house?

You can learn how we deal with chores from this older post. An updated one is coming soon now that we have a larger home to keep clean! So, stay tuned!!