Schedules, A Gift Part 1: Why and How to Schedule
Like many of us who are socially distancing at home, it can be a struggle to get organized. From keeping up with proper hygiene practices, working from home, exercising, eating lunch, and calculating the right time to go to the grocery store, it can be a challenge figuring out where to start. With children, the challenge and stress increases exponentially. Trying to balance between getting your kid’s school work done while providing an enriched and formative home learning experience during mandated school closures can be daunting, overwhelming, and depending on how much coffee you’ve had, how long your kids have been up for, and which child is screaming and for what, utterly impossible.
Here’s something to try, if you haven’t yet already: schedules. We all function better when we have a schedule in mind. A schedule can be an individualized list of goals and objectives for the day/future or a seriation of plans to be executed in some order whether sequentially or by luck of the draw. Whatever your inclination, it helps when there is a pot of pre-planned activities to draw from. When you have a schedule, regardless of its short term or long term nature, you feel like a well oiled machine. If analogies about robotic tendencies and efficiencies isn’t your thing, schedules make you feel like you’ve walked 500 miles and will walk 500 more towards something. The more tasks you complete in your schedule, the more you feel like you’ve accomplished your self-assigned purpose. Not to say that planning the rest of your life is the secret to life, but, schedules make those pleasant surprises and delightful deviations that much more gratifying.
Now, let’s take this grand claim and contextualize it back to the subject at hand. If creating and completing schedules, can be both grounding and rewarding for adults, we can likely assume that they can be for children. However, creating a schedule, on its own, cannot control how we behave nor can it predict how much of that schedule we actually complete. A schedule is like the ocean’s current leading you toward some destination, but the ship can be rickety, the captain wayward, and the winds fierce and angry. Creating and completing a schedule, like all skills, must be learned, reinforced, and associated with improving and enjoyable conditions to be maintained.
Here’s how to set up a working schedule at home for your children:
Create a list of activities:
activities of daily living (ADL) (i.e. toothbrushing, showering, hygiene related activities)
fun and preferred activities your child ALREADY enjoys
activities that require physical exertion and movement (i.e., dance party, a hike around the neighborhood, obstacle course)
fun activities that your child can TRY
school work that needs to be done for the day
activities that appeal to the arts (i.e., music, art, literature)
chores that your child can help with
fun activities that you can complete as a family
pre-planned screen/tv time.
resting/ winding down activities
Pick out certain activities that you would like to establish as part of a routine. These are activities that you may want to complete daily and also engage in at the same time during the day. For example: toothbrushing should always be done after a meal, or story time should always be before bedtime, nap time should always be after lunch, etc. When you have activities that are part of a routine, it breaks the day down into smaller more manageable parts. This will help for time management as a parent. This will also provide your child a level of predictability for the day. If you can establish a fun activity as part of a routine, children can have something to look forward to everyday.
Now the hard part, plan the day ahead. Write it down, or create a visual schedule (read part 2 of this series on Visual Schedules). Include your children in the planning process. Though total freedom and choice is the ultimate goal, when you are first starting out you may want to act as mediator, facilitator, and negotiator at the same time. Because you are the parent of your child, feel comfortable in establishing which activities are non-negotiable especially when they pertain to health, safety, and hygiene. Do this early on! At the same time, feel comfortable in deciding which battles are worth fighting and which ones to save for another day. For example: if you can tell that your child is having a rough morning, allow some flexibility in the amount of non-preferred activities to complete that day. Focus on fun activities so that your children associate schedules with improving and enjoyable conditions.
Some tips in sequencing activities:
Find out what your child’s preferences are. Put them in a hierarchy of highly preferred, moderately preferred, neutrally preferred, and non-preferred. You can even place non-preferred activities in a hierarchy.
If your child has absolutely no history with schedules or following schedules, start with a short sequence of only preferred activities. Once you can transition smoothly between activities, begin creating longer sequences with increasing alternations of non-preferred and preferred activities.
In between activities that need to be completed, and or activities you would like to establish as part of a routine, sprinkle alternating levels of preferred activities.
Build in times for free play/ free choice/ free to do what you want to do (of course within the limits of what is safe and reasonable)
Assign beginning and end times, and general durations of each activity. For activities that are more open ended, allow for some flexibility.
Don’t spend all your money in one place. This means, don’t do all the highly preferred activities right out of the gate. Spread them out across the day to keep your child engaged for longer durations.
Allowing access to a highly preferred activity upon completing a not so preferred activity can increase the likelihood of the not so preferred activity occurring. In short, plan for and use “you have to do your homework before you can watch tv” type of sequencing and language. When faced with a non-preferred activity that your child may need to complete for the sake of safety, health, hygiene, learning or anything that is important and beneficial for the child and the family - you may want to only allow access to a highly preferred activity when this non-preferred activity has been completed.
A caveat: Forcing compliance toward a non-preferred activity can create aversive and coercive associations between learner and caregiver and may potentially lead to more issues in the future under similar conditions. A better strategy will always be to identify why the child dislikes that activity. Is it too difficult? Is the task within their current repertoire? Do they even understand what it is they’re asked to do? Do they need support in completing it? Is the motivation to complete the activity present? Identifying the why and how to support will always be a better strategy and lead to a more positive learning experience for you and your child.
Follow through. Once you have created a schedule for the day, follow through. As a parent, following through with what you say you’ll do builds your child’s rule following behavior. If you do what you say and say what you mean, children will learn to trust you and that your words and language are directly correlated to future behaviors, activities, and conditions (whether preferred or non-preferred).
Food for thought: Have you ever given your child a warning that they absolutely, repeatedly, and reliably ignored? Chances are at some point, or even repeatedly, you’ve not done what you said you would do. And that’s okay- behavior can be changed as long as we also change the conditions surrounding that behavior. Follow through!
Repeat, repeat, repeat. And then add some variety. Over time and multiple repetitions, activities, behaviors, schedules and its completion become established as part of a routine. Once you can easily create schedules and transition between activities with no major issues, begin introducing some variability and variety. Sprinkle in a surprise break. Surprise fun activity. Surprise get out of work card. All these pleasant surprises strengthen the reinforcing and rewarding properties of creating and completing a schedule.
Give these steps several tries and see how much easier it can be to manage a day full of wonderful, exciting, maybe-not-so-fun-but-needs-to-be-done and necessary tasks and activities!
Read Schedules, A Gift Part 2: Visual Schedules to learn how to use visual schedules and some free resources I’ve found online