Your child may have already started scrubbing pots and pans as they fill the dishwasher. It seems like a pretty natural transition. But if they haven’t, it is time to start training them.

We try to soak the pots and pans after we finish cooking and when we’re eating a meal so that they are ready to be scrubbed when we get up from the table. Sometimes this isn’t possible, or you forget and so helping them scan the room and find the pots and pans that need to be soaked before they get started is an excellent idea.

Train them to rinse the pan well and remove as much food and particles as possible before cleaning it. This makes the next step a whole lot easier and keeps things clean.

There are a lot of choices of scrub brushes and scrubbing products on the market. We have found that the most cost-effective is having a scrub brush with a handle for light scrubbing and rinsing. We usually try to change that out every month because they get food particles stuck between the bristles, which isn’t easy to clean.

A way to extend the life of that scrub brush is to put it in the dishwasher every once in a while. Even that doesn’t remove all the food particles, so you must replace it periodically.

We use SOS pads when that scrub brush doesn’t get the job done. They are impregnated with a little bit of soap, and it doesn’t take much scrubbing to get most caked-on food off the pan. The only drawback to using SOS pads is that they quickly disintegrate and rust. Some suggest you return the SOS pad in the box after use to keep it from rusting. I don’t recommend that, as most kids will probably not shake it out well enough, and there is probably food on it, which sets it up to grow germs. We have a small dish where we put the scrub brush and any SOS pads. Most of the time, we can get a few uses out of the SOS pad before it rusts and needs to be thrown in the trash.  

Depending on how many people you have in your home, It is a good practice to wash your pots, dry them, and put them away, bypassing the dishwasher. We do this because our big pots take up a lot of space. This space can be utilized for other dishes and allow us 2 preserve energy by not running the dishwasher so often.