New survey shows housework is child’s play

More than one in three parents encourages their children to get involved with the cleaning to help develop their sense of responsibility. That was one of the fascinating findings from a study of 2,000 British adults conducted by OnePoll on behalf of Molly Maid, the UK’s leading professional domestic cleaning service.

Drilling down a little further into the results, we found that70% of these parents offer pocket money of £3.71, on average, for each cleaning task that their child performs. Mind you, they wantto make sure they get their money’s worth with 45% of these parents saying that they would only pay out for a job well done.

It’s the same story all over the country, although what does change across the regions is the amount of pocket money on offer. It probably won’t surprise you to learn that children in London earn the most for helping out with an average £4.42 per task. This figure drops to £3.13 for children in Wales, and £3.16 for those inthe South-West, who have to work a little harder for their cash.

This comprehensive survey brought to light some other surprising insights into the nation’s housework habits today:

• On average, we spend a frightening 10 years of our life on doing household chores
• Men are now almost, but not quite, doing as much housework as women. Men spend an average of 7.21 hours a week on cleaning tasks which is just 53 minutes less than the average for women
• 41% of people admit to regularly skipping the vacuuming in favour of simply picking the most noticeable bits off the floor. This frees up more valuable time to do the things they really want to do like reading, going to the gym and hanging out with the family

Pam Bader, OBE, Chief Executive of Molly Maid, commented: “This survey is a real insight into the day-to-day habits of the British public. The results reflect a shift in priorities for many British families that has directly impacted our business. In the last 12months alone we have seen an increase of almost 5% in the number of cleans to more than a quarter of a million – as a greater number of households opt to use a professional cleaning service to allow for more ‘me time’.

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