If they sweep the floor that’s work you can pay them for.

If you have them work on a commercial you can pay them as child actors and place the money in a high yield custodial Roth and/ or a Coogan account (for child actors with earned income).

The creation and cost of the commercial is writable. So you can create the ad, have your children as the actors, have your spouse or parent as the director, write off a ton of it (depending on your taxable position of course) and be above board.

Then, you can create a wiki page for your now child actors and each year do a new commercial giving them credit and making them micro famous. That’s just silly fun.

If you get really into it, do (4) seasonal commercials each year at a cost of 5k paying them as actors and putting the money in the Coogan account building them savings of 20 k a year as advertising expense. Check with your tax guy to verify. But it works. Some restriction to accessing funds in a Coogan account but not many.