Non-Negotiables of Parenting
Joey and Carla Link
August 28, 2024
There will never be a time in their lives when your kids will not need to know how to manage their day. Start teaching them how by structuring their day for them until they can do it themselves. A routine will look different for different ages of kids, so you need to plan a routine for each child. There are times their routines can and will merge and times they will all be doing something separately.
On their individual routines, your kids can have time to be alone, time to play with one particular sibling, time to play with all of their siblings and so forth. This is how a routine helps manage your day with kids of different ages.
· A routine will tell you if your kids want to obey you or not. Either they will do what the routine says or they won’t. It usually won’t take you long to find out what the mood of the day is.
· A routine brings order to your day. It is more than doing certain things at certain times of the day. It isn’t about watching the clock. Sticking to a certain order and not to a schedule gives flexibility.
· A routine brings predictability to your child’s day which makes them feel secure. Children with the choleric temperament will heartily fight it because they want to be in control, instead of letting a routine tell them what to do, yet they thrive on one as do kids with the Sanguine temperament.
· A routine puts healthy boundaries into your children’s lives. Boundaries are the best teachers of self-control.
So, get your children’s day under YOUR control! It does take time to learn how to set up a routine that works, but it becomes habit once you get used to putting one together. Once you get a basic routine down for each age group of your kids, you won’t have to change it much. Before my kids started managing their routines on their own, I did them a month at a time and would put a week’s routine on each of their bulletin boards above their desks.
When each of our kids took over managing their own routines, they also did their school routines as well, deciding how many pages of each subject they did a day. I showed them how to do a semester’s worth at a time. When they got to college, it wasn’t difficult to bring order to their day as they had been doing it at home for years.
“But all things should be done decently and in order.”
1 Corinthians 14:40 ESV
You will find more information on routines and how to merge the routines of several children into one in the Mom’s Notes presentations “Structuring Your Child’s Day, Part 1 and Part 2”.
Leave a Reply