Today’s post is simple, but perhaps it will be for you what it was for me a few years ago: something that only seemed obvious in retrospect. A few years ago, Annie was a newborn, Shep was in preschool, and June had just started kindergarten. I was fresh into the toting-three-kids-in-the-car phase of parenthood and realizing that I simply couldn’t carry the older two’s things in from the car as I had become accustomed to when I also needed to heft an infant carseat and my own things. And, once we got inside, I often needed to attend to the baby right away – so something that delayed the immediate cries for a snack would be helpful. So, in the Montessori mindset of “don’t do for a child what she can do for herself,” we instituted what we call after-school jobs. We officially told the kids they were responsible for the following when we got home from school each day: When each step is complete, they can have a snack. For us, moving the snack to the final step in the process is a very simple and effective mechanism to make sure the jobs get completed with minimal reminders or whining. The expectation is clear. Rest assured, there is still at times both whining and reminders, but it is much easier for me to say, “did you do your jobs?” than to nag them repeatedly on individual items. Any sense of grievance seems to shift to the house policy rather than land on me as the enforcing individual, if that makes sense. We don’t use cards or a chart to illustrate the steps; it’s really not that much and we just reminded them of the steps when we were getting started as needed. Even Annie, at two, is a participant