I hope everyone had a great weekend! Weekends for my family are usually much-needed chill days. Unfortunately, this can make for some incredibly difficult Mondays! Like today for example, one weekend and the kiddos seem to have forgotten how to do EVERYTHING. Can you relate? Chores after lunch typically don’t take longer than 1:30 pm. Today it is over an hour past that.
Truly the importance of routines at any stage in life is essential. Particularly if you have children, and especially when there are more than one of those children. Without some kind of routine, chaos is what there is. I know, because I have lived it! And I am certain that I am not the only one.
Starting a Routine for the Kids
Before I actually established our children’s morning routine, I would have to routinely tell them what was expected of them (even though they literally did the same thing every day). Technically they already had a morning routine, but they would always forget what they were supposed to be doing. So, I created a PowerPoint that pinpointed their mornings and their evenings, printed it and hung it up on the kitchen wall so it was seen every day.
This has definitely helped them, but I still need to keep them on task. It’s prompted me to find ways to help them get it engrained, and our weekend of chill time has seriously disturbed the method here! Breaks are obviously important, but it seems to me that when you are trying to get down a routine repetition is key people. This helps make the proposed routine automatic! Towards the end of the week, the kids seem to have it down I barely need to redirect them.
But since I wasn’t enforcing it on a weekend as much it inhibits how they get it down when the fresh week starts. Parenting is trial and error, so long as you learn from what you are doing there can always be improvements! Before they had a routine however, it was even worse. So truly it has helped them and me.
Making it Work
If you don’t have clear boundaries with your kids, then any kind of boundary is pretty blurry. The loss of patience is immense, and so are the unhelpful habits that you can get into. That isn’t fair to you or to them in any respect. Enforcing that routine is just as important as actually establishing the routine, if they see it on the wall and I don’t say a thing about it then it’s literally just like a picture on the wall that gets ignored.
That is what today’s Monday is like, a sloth day where the routine doesn’t exist. This was an error on my part because consistency is so dang important guys! Kids can be consistent, but if their parents aren’t trying to be consistent with them then they won’t try either. They learn from us first and that is always going to be a fact.
I don’t give them an insane routine in the morning it follows like this,
- Breakfast
- Brush teeth and hair
- Clean ears (the girls refuse to routinely clean their ear piercings without this one!)
- Make their beds
- Read a chapter of their bible
- Chores
It isn’t insane, and like I said, towards the end of the week they do a good job! I just need to keep them on it during the weekends because when I don’t Monday to Tuesday and even Wednesdays sometimes, are just chaotic and it spikes my anxiety through the roof.
Final Thoughts
I used to not believe in the idea of routines to be perfectly honest. But we got into really bad habits. When this was finally established for them, it changed how their days worked, made them smoother, and gave us all better habits. In fact, I even created my own morning and evening routines because they are so helpful at any age! My mornings feel a lot more refreshing, and it makes me feel more confident.
I don’t know if it has helped with my children’s confidence per se, but it has helped them otherwise have a better day. And when they have a good day, so do I usually. It’s a hand in hand thing, and I couldn’t even imagine going back to where we were before. Well, I could imagine it, and it sucks haha.
Perhaps a routine is what is missing for you!
Best regards,
~TKNott~
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