Around here, I try to assign chores based on things like age, ability, size and interest.  For example, my eight-year-old might want to wash dishes, but he's too short to turn on the faucet in the kitchen sink. So that chore will have to go to someone else until he gets bigger.

The same goes for outside chores like mowing the lawn.  A teenager can mow the lawn--and my eighteen-year-old is the one for the job right now, until he goes off to college in August.  An eight-year-old cannot mow the lawn, but he can pick up the soccer balls, Nerf darts, light sabers and sandbox shovels that wind up scattered all over the grass before his brother starts up the lawn mower.

My younger son doesn't understand why we make him do this job.  To hear him tell it, he's not the one who played with any of these toys.  And being rather dramatic in temperament, he protests his fate long and loudly.  It's not uncommon to hear me tell him, "If you had just gone outside and picked up your stuff, you would have been finished by now."

He doesn't realize that his brother isn't going to stop the mower just because there's a Nerf dart in the grass in front of him.  In fact, my older son is famous for destroying all kinds of things with the lawn mower:  he's shredded numerous "Army Guys" who blend in with the grass, and even decapitated the Fisher-Price boat captain (I believe he saved the captain's head as a souvenir).

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