"lazy" middle child

amother

Violet

Sat, Oct 10 2015, 11:51 pm

I have 2 boys close in age(4.5 and 3) when it comes to chores--mostly clean up, the older one often gets right to it, or if he doesn't I'll set a consequence of "if you dont' put away the toys you can't play with them tomorrow" so the older one will hurry to put everything away, and the younger one will say "I'll watch" or put like 1 thing away or complain that "it's hard" (to which I respond that "yes, but you can do it" or "I'll help you". At this age my older son was fully-capable of cleaning up and while I know that they are different personalities I don't like the fact that the younger one "gets away" with being lazy and that he relies on his older brother for cleaning up. I've given him choices about cleaning (ex. you can clean up the legos or the cars) and he wont choose, so big brother does, lets say he chooses the legos, then younger DS will start to whine "I wanted to do the legos", "sorry you lost your chance this time, next time" then he refuses to help with anything. I don't want my older son catching on that he's doing all the work and become resentful of his brother or the chores. Any suggestions? Tonight I told older DS that he could get a mitzvah note for all of his cleaning, so younger DS started whining "I want a mitzvah note" so I said "clean up". "NO", eventually he put away one thing after much goading and I wasn't so enthusiastic about writing the mitzvah note when he dragged his feet about it so much. What do I do?