Household and the family

After reading a thread on an online board recently I have been giving this whole topic some thought and the following is how I feel about it.

When your family grows it can be difficult to find the right way of keeping it up to your standards while the rest of the family has to live there as well.
What would be the most respectful way for all family members to be able to live together.

One thing is for sure, there should be no coercion or pushing or threatening to help out with it. Of course parents can ask for help when things need to be done. And when the family takes the children seriously and respects them they will help. Freedom does a lot of a human being, no matter how small.

In our house there is actually an agreement, not a pushed down their throat type of situation, that after dinner we all take stuff to the kitchen so it gets cleaned up fast. Its pretty cool how this goes and it means within 5 minutes we all can have fun again.
It took time and discussion to get there of course, it didn't go overnight, like it would have when we would have pushed it down their throat.
Simply explaining that everybody likes to go have fun and that we are a small community where we all can help out each other to make the less fun tasks take as little time as possible so we all have time for fun stuff after that made it quite easy. They like playing board games with us, or just simply do math with my partner in the evenings, but when we are cleaning or so we don't have the time for that, when everybody chips in a bit, its a job of minutes and there we go, be there for them.
There is no nagging, rewards, punishments or so necessary to get that fixed, just simple life examples.