Teach Your Kids to Do Laundry (Plus Free Laundry Cheat Sheet!)

In celebration of National Laundry Day, I’ve created a free printable laundry cheat sheet. I’ve included all of my favorite laundry tricks to help make doing laundry as easy as possible!

How to Teach Your Kids to Do Laundry

Because I’m a tyrant caring mom, I make my kids do their own laundry. Harsh, I know, but they aren’t going to live with me forever so they have to learn sooner or later. Sooner frees me up to do other fun stuff like clean baseboards and vacuum curtains.

Age-Appropriate Laundry Responsibilities

The best way to teach your kids to do laundry is to introduce new skills slowly. Here’s a general idea of which tasks kids can learn when:

• Toddlers: As soon as your children are able to undress themselves, they can learn to place their dirty clothes in a hamper.
• Preschoolers: At this stage, children can sort whites from colors and help match socks. They also usually enjoy helping empty the dryer.
• School-Aged Children: Should be able to fold clothes and put them away. They can also move normal laundry from the washer to the dryer.
• Tweens: Are capable of doing their own laundry with some guidance for stain-treating and special care items.
• Teens: Should be doing their own laundry.

You will have some mishaps. My note for tweens comes from my oldest son’s unfortunate attempt to do his own laundry the first time. All of his new wool Christmas sweaters shrank in the dryer.

The printable laundry cheat sheet I created has the basics listed so kids (and adults) can easily remember which temperature and cycle settings to use for different types of laundry.

Avoid Harmful Products

Because I want my kids to learn how to do their own laundry, I’m careful about the products I use. I don’t want them exposed to harmful chemicals during their learning process.

You’ll notice on my cheat sheet, the stain remover and dryer tricks use common household items. For our laundry detergent, I try to stick with established brands dye-free and fragrance-free versions.

Both my mom (who lives with us) and my daughter have sensitive skin so a hypoallergenic detergent is a MUST for us.

Liquid or Pods?

I keep both on hand to cover all my laundry needs.

Liquid detergent gives us the option to adjust how much we use to the size of the laundry load.

Plus, for light stains, rubbing a little liquid detergent into the stain before washing is sometimes all it takes to remove it. For tougher stains, see the all-purpose stain remover formula on the Laundry Cheat Sheet.

Of course, if you’re worried about accidental spills or not measuring the right amount of liquid detergent, there’s no beating the convenience of a pre-portioned pod, which is why we use these too.

Printable Laundry Cheat Sheet

The purpose of this laundry cheat sheet is to keep the most important, basic laundry information readily available.

This way, when you or your kids are doing laundry and realize you’re out of stain treater, you don’t have to go look up how to make it. Or, if you need to quickly get the wrinkles out of a shirt and you don’t have time to iron, you’ll know what to do.

Just click the image below to download/print the Laundry Cheat Sheet.