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Worksheet III – Kids can help with the laundry!

How to get your kids to help with the laundry? Well, it takes training, but it can be done. Even a 9 year old can be taught what to do. Here are the basics, which you have to model and then observe in your little apprentice.

1. Put whatever is in the washer into the dryer. Check to be sure that nothing is caught in the door. Before turning on the dryer, clean the lint trap – every time. Now is a good time to explain that many household fires begin in the dryer. (Never leave the dryer running when you leave the house or the household is asleep. Never.)
2. Put in a dryer sheet in the cold weather, but only use 1/3 or ¼ of a sheet per load – it's plenty for removing static and won't irritate sensitive skin (if you have trouble with eczema the softener could be the culprit) . Never use fabric softener with towels (it limits their absorbency).
3. Check dryer settings before turning on. Darks can usually do fine on permanent press (other than jeans), and lights are cleaner if you use high (did you know that the greater part of disinfecting clothing takes place in a hot dryer? Always dry towels on high.). Pay attention to how short a drying cycle you can get away with to actually render a load dry. Over drying costs a lot – in energy and worn-out clothing.
4. Check to be sure that the load contains the type of clothing it's meant to: i.e. that there are no white blouses lurking in amongst the blue jeans, no red t-shirts in with the whites, leading inevitably to the pink-underwear look so fashionable among large families. Also that no one has inadvertently tossed in a treasured wool sweater. Put any delicate items on the drying rack. But even these calamities are well worth the freedom gained for mom from the laundry room.
5. Put the load in the washer, taking care not to stuff it in. Here we can add a valuable lecture on the nature of the machine in general. My dad, an industrial engineering professor, used to impress upon me that "we never force anything." It's not magic, it's an expensive appliance that has to last us a long time.
6. Measure out the appropriate amount of detergent. If you can manage to get the child to add the detergent beforehand, so much the better, but my feeling is that you can't know how much you need until you see the true size of the load, and for that it all has to be in there. Try to show him to sprinkle the detergent well in around the clothes, not to chuck it on top of the agitator. Mysterious white powder on clean clothes is a sign that detergent has gotten on the agitator above the water line, and then onto the clothes as they are pulled out.
7. Before the hand touches the dial, check settings. Water temp and load size are the two most important ones. Explain what happens to the washer if it tries to strain through a super load of towels on the extra-small setting.
8. If you are washing sheets, add a cup of ammonia to get hair greasiness out of pillowcases. If you are washing towels, a small amount of bleach will cure the "sour" or mildewy smell they often get. It's well worth getting really colorfast towels or even white ones so you can bleach them to be truly sweet smelling. (But most towels are fairly colorfast. That is because manufacturers know that there is a small amount of bleach in municipal water systems. Also pools. Also cleaning products that will likely come in contact with the towels.) Both these additives should be put in the bleach dispenser (but never together – they combine to form a deadly gas. You can rinse the dispenser out with a cupful of the water from the machine as it fills.).
9. Turn on the machine. Make sure the dryer is indeed on if there are clothes in there. It slows things down so much if someone forgot to run the dryer!