“I’m going to do laundry tomorrow. Please make sure you give me all your socks!”
No matter how many times I’ve said that to my kids, results have been lackluster. Last week I really focused one day and did all the laundry in the house. I folded about five or six pairs of socks for each of my three kids. In spite of this, my youngest came to me two days later claiming to be out of socks. I checked the older two kids’ drawers in case I had secretly given birth to some kind of sock-stealing, sock-hoarding squirrel… but no, they were low on socks too.
Obviously, there are a lot of problems here. How do you go through five pairs of socks in under 48 hours? How can you own over 20 pairs of socks, but have less than seven in your drawer after all the laundry was cleaned? Were my children eating socks? Why?? I swear I feed them!
Maybe I needed to buy more socks… but I just did that a month ago! Buying more socks clearly wasn’t fixing this problem.
I needed to do something different.
On the way home from the grocery store on Friday, I came to a decision.
“I’m going to hold a contest tomorrow. Whichever child finds the most lost socks by dinnertime tomorrow – and they have to be lost ones, I’m going to check your drawers as soon as we get home, so don’t you dare try to make me re-wash clean ones – is going to get extra electronics time tomorrow evening.”
I wasn’t sure what kind of response to expect, but as I got done putting away groceries, my oldest came in with an armload of socks and a cunning grin. “If I find lost socks today, can I hide them and turn them in tomorrow?”
“…Yes?”
“Yessss! Mwahahahahah!”
A few minutes later, oldest came back, highly offended. “Middle and youngest are joining forces! They say they’re a team!”
“A team? For finding socks?”
“Yes!”
Well, holy crap. My children are actually putting effort into looking for lost socks? My kids working together for a common goal? Heck no, I wasn’t gonna try to stop that! But… if all the kids were actually trying this, I didn’t want anyone to give up in discouragement.
“They can absolutely be a team. I just want the socks to be collected. However, I might pick more than one winner if everyone makes a really good effort.”
Oldest considered this, unconvinced.
Distraction time! “I wonder if anyone has checked behind the couches…”
Oldest gasped. “No! I better do that.”
At any rate, a half-hour later, before I had even intended to start the contest, my children had gathered these:
Amazing. Exactly what I’d wanted for literal years, and all it took was a tiny bit of bribery and a little competition.
Not only that, youngest asked middle the following afternoon if they “could play the sock game again.”
It takes a little mental effort to “gamify” things for kids, but the results really speak for themselves.
