“Why does she only have to feed the cat and I have to do the bins AND the recycling AND the dishwasher.” My eldest had counted. She had also, notably, not counted how long feeding the cat takes versus rolling two bins to the kerb, because at nine, a list of three sounds like more than a list of one, whatever is actually inside each item.
I used to answer this with maths. I would explain minutes, effort, difficulty, and watch none of it land, because the complaint was never really about minutes. It was about fairness, and fairness to a nine year old means sameness, full stop, at least until you explain, patiently and often, that those are not the same thing.
Chores for siblings go wrong almost every time in the same place: a family tries to make the list equal, gives up because equal is impossible across different ages and different children, and ends up with no system at all, just whoever grumbles least doing the most.
Fair is not equal, and children can learn that
The honest starting point is that a five year old and an eleven year old cannot do the same job, so an identical chore list was never actually fair, it just looked fair on paper. What children can accept, with some repetition, is a list that is matched to what each of them can actually do, explained openly rather than assumed.
Say it out loud, more than once: “you have three things because they are quick, she has one because it is a big one” is a sentence a child can hold onto. Silence on why the split looks the way it does is what produces “why me”, because a child left to guess at the reasoning usually guesses favouritism.
Split by age and capacity, not by headcount
The instinct is to divide the household job list by the number of children, which produces oddly equal-looking piles that ignore what each child can actually do well. A better split starts from the jobs themselves: which ones only the older one can safely or reliably do, which ones the younger one is actually excited about, and which ones genuinely need to rotate because nobody wants them forever.
A rough shape that tends to work: each child has one or two jobs that are entirely theirs, tied to what they can do at their age, plus a shared pool of jobs nobody wants that rotates on a fixed schedule rather than by whoever grumbles first. The age chart is a reasonable starting point for what each child can actually hold, before you start arguing about who gets what.
Make rotation actually rotate
Rotation fails constantly in ordinary families, not because the idea is wrong but because nobody writes down whose turn it is, so it defaults to memory, and memory defaults to whoever spoke up last. Put the rotation somewhere visible, a chart, a wheel, a shared list, so “whose turn is it” has an answer nobody has to argue about.
Rotate the jobs nobody likes, not the jobs everybody likes. There is no need to rotate the pet’s dinner if one child adores the pet and the other could not care less, that is not unfairness, that is one child correctly getting the job they actually want. Rotate the bins, the vacuuming, whatever sits at the bottom of everyone’s list, so that job does not permanently belong to whoever has the least ability to argue their way out of it.
Let them help build the list
Children accept a system far more easily when they had a hand in it, even a small one. A short family meeting where the week’s jobs get named and picked, rather than assigned from above, turns “my parents gave me the worst one” into “I chose this one”, which is a completely different sentence to a child even when the actual job is identical.
This does not mean children run the household. It means the grown-up sets the boundaries, these jobs need doing, these are roughly matched to your ages, and the children get real say inside that frame. A choice between two options is still a choice, and it removes most of the “why me” before it starts.
When ages are far apart
A gap of five or six years between siblings makes a strictly equal split obviously silly, and most families sensibly give up trying. What still matters is that the younger one has something real, not a token job invented purely so nobody feels left out, and that the older one’s bigger load is named as bigger rather than quietly assumed, “you’re older, you just do more” without ever being said out loud reads to a teenager as being punished for growing up.
A useful move as the gap widens is giving the older child ownership over a whole area rather than a longer list of small tasks, their own washing start to finish, say, rather than three extra chores tacked onto a list that already looked unfair from where they were standing.
Stopping the daily “why me”
Most “why me” complaints are not actually about the chore. They are a child checking whether the system is still being applied fairly, out loud, because a nine year old cannot exactly request an audit. The fastest way to reduce it is not to argue the specific case each time but to have an answer ready that points at the system rather than the mood of the moment: “it’s Tuesday, so it’s your turn on the list, same as it was last Tuesday for your brother.”
A visible, unchanging structure does most of this work by itself. What keeps reopening the argument is a system that changes depending on who complained loudest last time, because that genuinely is unfair, and children notice it faster than adults expect.
When one sibling consistently does less
Sometimes the complaint is accurate. One child genuinely dodges, forgets, or drags a job out until someone else quietly does it for them. This is not solved by lecturing the other sibling about patience. It needs its own fix, usually smaller steps, a clearer finish line, or a closer eye on that particular child’s routine, separate from the sibling comparison entirely, because “be more like your sister” teaches resentment, not responsibility.
Questions parents ask
Should chores for siblings pay the same amount?
Not necessarily. Matching the reward to the job rather than to the child avoids most arguments: a bigger or less pleasant job can reasonably carry more, as long as the reasoning is explained rather than assumed, the same way the chores themselves get matched to age and effort.
How do I stop constant comparing between siblings?
Talk about each child’s own list rather than the other’s. “Your list, your jobs” said consistently, without comparing effort or speed between children, tends to quiet this faster than explaining the fairness of the split each time.
Should the oldest always get more chores?
Usually more capability rather than strictly more chores, and it helps to name that openly so it does not read as a quiet punishment for being older. An older child taking on one bigger area of ownership often lands better than a longer list of small extra tasks.
What if my children just will not stop arguing about fairness?
Bring them into building the rotation itself, even briefly. Most of the argument is about not having a say, and a short weekly meeting to set the week’s jobs together usually does more than any explanation of why the current split is actually fair.
Where Pluck fits
Pluck keeps each child’s quests and prizes entirely their own, on their own map, so a sibling’s list is never sitting in view being silently compared line by line. A grown-up can still set jobs matched to each child’s age and split the shared ones on a rotation, but the daily “why does she only have one thing” has less to look at, because each child sees their own quests, not the household’s whole list laid out side by side. It will not settle every argument about fairness. It does take away the one where a child is counting a sibling’s list instead of doing their own.