Mom explains why she doesn't ask her kids to 'help' at home
Sam Kelly opened up about changing how she talks about chores with her kids.
As a mom of three, Sam Kelly doesn't shy away from talking to her kids about the big picture and more complicated ideas.
"I've always been someone to lean toward kids being able to kind of soak in and understand more than we give them credit for," the former therapist-turned-mom coach told "Good Morning America."
One of these ideas included changing the way she and her husband Chas Kelly talk to their children -- Hero, 11, Goldie, 9, and Shepard, 6 -- about "helping" around the house with chores and everyday tasks, an initiative she opened up about in a recent Instagram post. It's a shift she embarked on about 18 months ago, when she and her husband started discussing a more equal divide of managing their household.
"It's a Friday night and I'm sitting down to make a list, a Saturday chore chart list for my kids, and I was like, 'What am I doing? I am doing the exact same thing for my kids that I just spent the past year of my life trying to work with my husband to unlearn,'" Kelly recalled.
The Utah resident said even though she considered her husband a "very supportive" partner, she had still previously found herself taking on a mental and invisible workload as a parent that was not healthy or sustainable for her.
"I actually grew up seeing what I interpreted as a very equitable relationship with my mom and dad, a really supportive partnership," Kelly said. "But what's interesting is that I still fell into this pattern of being crushed by the mental load and having to do it all and the societal expectations."
Kelly, her husband and their kids now make it a point of talking about dividing their household labor through a different lens, and they've even started a system Kelly refers to as "notice and do."
"I talked to them about the concept of what we call now 'notice and do's.' So, teaching them how to notice what needs to be done in the house, see a need and then to do it," Kelly explained. "I also started talking to them about these bigger concepts like societal expectations for women and mothers in age appropriate, understandable ways for each of them, and the importance of breaking that cycle for their futures."
Nowadays, instead of telling one of her children to "go unload the dishwasher," Kelly might say instead, "Hey, could you look around the kitchen and just pick one thing to notice and do?"
Kelly said at the end of the day, she wants her children to grow up to not just know life skills, but to also be proactive and anticipate needs ahead of time, especially within a partnership.
"If we don't have conversations with our kids about what this is and start to teach them, like, how to notice what needs to be done in a home, instead of just waiting for the mom or the woman in the house to do the invisible work ... then the cycle is just going to keep repeating," Kelly said.
"Language is so powerful," she added.
Her kids, she said, have also been reacting positively to the shift in language and perspective.
"It also gives them a sense of control and power of choice of like, 'I'm not being ordered around. I'm not being told what to do,'" Kelly said. "I'm teaching them how to see, how to notice, how to see a mess, what is involved in going into a room and resetting a room, for example."
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