Make Chores Fun with HighScore House

What if you could make cleaning up a game and reward your kids for doing their chores without resorting to cash based allowance?

I’ve talked before about apps and technology trying to turn the mundane into fun for the kids. HighScore House is a Canadian website that makes things fun by allowing parents to give points to their kids as a reward for doing their daily chores.

HOW IT WORKS

Parents log into the website and enter all of their child's daily chores, focusing on the ones that are especially painful to get them to comply with – like making the bed is at our house.  Once all the tasks are entered, you can assign a point value to the tasks.  

At the end of the day, your child can log in to the site and mark off all of the tasks that they have completed which adds to their point bank. The interface is fresh and funky, and definitely has a ‘fun’ appeal to it.

REWARDS FOR CLEANING UP

After the kids have logged their points, you as the parent log in and confirm that they were actually done. You can also award points for ‘Extras’ that you may not require to be done every day like reading a book, or putting away laundry.

The beauty in this system is that once the kids have enough points, they can redeem them for rewards like picking what they want for dinner (10 points) or staying up an extra 15 minutes past bedtime (20 points).  Because the rewards are defined by you, you are also giving your children a fun way to learn how to work for long term goals.

From some of the reviews I’ve been reading, the site is really helping some parents get their kids excited about doing their daily chores.  The Geekling (5 years old) wasn’t as thrilled about it, but I can see this working really well for the 7-11 group.  Heck, if we geared it to the proper rewards I might start using it for myself ;)

If you want to try HighScore House for your family, enter the invite code yummy to get access and start using it.

Let me know what you think! Does this kind of reward system work for your family? What other strategies do you use for chores?