Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek

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Getting my kids to do their chores is always a challenge. Even the simplest task, such as putting everything away after breakfast, is often completed so badly that we may as well have done it ourselves. I wanted to try to find a way to motivate my kids to complete their chores properly, and I wondered whether setting up a chore tracker in Home Assistant might work.

There are several chore trackers for Home Assistant

If you are so inclined, you can use Home Assistant to create a set of automations and helpers to build a dedicated chore tracker from scratch. The good news, however, is that other people have already done the hard work; there are multiple chore tracker integrations that you can add to Home Assistant.

After a bit of research, I decided to go with the KidsChores integration, as it incorporates a high level of gamification that should encourage my kids to complete their chores and earn rewards. The KidsChores integration has to be added via HACS; it’s not one of the default integrations included in Home Assistant.

Setting up the chore tracker was a team effort

For the chore tracker to be effective, everyone needed to buy into it, including my wife, but most especially my kids. Selling my wife on the idea wasn’t hard, as the idea of the kids actually cleaning up after breakfast and keeping their rooms tidy had obvious appeal. We needed to make sure the kids were on board, too.

The best way to do this was to involve them in the entire process. We sat down as a family and went through all the things the KidsChores integration can do and decided how we wanted it to work.

There’s a very helpful setup process that holds your hand as you set up the integration. It starts with choosing a name for the currency that kids earn when completing chores. They opted for stars, which may be inspired by their current obsession with Super Mario Galaxy on the Switch 2.

You then set up the number of kids and parents you want to use the integration, before moving on to creating the chores. You can create daily or weekly chores as well as chores for specific dates and assign any number of stars for completing them.

There are options for rewards that kids can claim by redeeming some of the stars they earn. For example, we set it up so that if they earn 100 stars (reasonably achievable), they can redeem them to earn “Friday candy”. If they earn 250 stars (the majority of chores completed), they can redeem them for their allowance. They can also lose stars for poor behavior, with the kids surprisingly offering a lot of suggestions for things that they might do to lose stars.

Ready-made dashboards save a lot of time

The integration wouldn’t be much use without a way for the kids to claim their chores and rewards, and for the parents to approve any chores that the kids have completed. It needs a set of Home Assistant dashboards that both kids and parents can use to interact with the integration and track progress. Building these dashboards from scratch wasn’t something I was particularly looking forward to.

Thankfully, like so much in Home Assistant, another user has been there first and done all the hard work. You can download the YAML for a ready-made dashboard that includes everything you need to use the chore tracker, from stats and buttons for marking a chore as complete for the kids, to chore approvals and point docking for the parents.

The YAML is for a single all-in-one dashboard that contains everything you might need. This isn’t ideal for practical use, as it means the same dashboard that the kids would use to mark a chore as completed will also include the button to approve that chore. My kids are smart enough to figure out that they could submit and approve as many chores as they wanted themselves. However, it’s easy enough to cut and paste the parents’ parts and kids’ parts into different dashboards; I ended up creating a separate dashboard for each of my kids and one for the parents to manage things.

Using the chore tracker is really motivating my kids

Once the chore tracker was set up, the only question left to answer was whether it would actually motivate my kids to complete their chores, or if the whole thing had been a waste of time. The good news is that so far, it’s really working.

Credit: Adam Davidson/How-To Geek

The kids love being able to claim their completed chores using a wall-mounted control panel (my Echo Hub displaying the dashboards in the Silk browser) and enjoy seeing their star collections mount up as they complete their chores. They especially enjoy being able to cash in their stars for rewards. The threat of losing points for bad behavior also seems to be working, with both of them often reminding the other that they might lose stars if they’re naughty.

It remains to be seen whether the chore tracker will stand the test of time, or whether my kids will get bored with it, and we’ll have to come up with another way to motivate them. For the moment, it’s been well worth the effort to set up, so I owe a huge debt of gratitude to VaReTaS on the Home Assistant forums for creating the integration, and to ccpk1 for the excellent dashboard.