Ep 10. Raising Successful Kids Skill #5 Time Management

Welcome back, mamas. Today we're wrapping up a six part series. We started this five episodes ago, talking about the skills that your COVID babies, infants, toddlers, and preschoolers need to practice every day in order to have a breadth of skill sets to go be ready learners and ready people to interact with the world.

So if you've missed the series, go back and check them out. I really dove deep on skill number one, which was waiting, patience, delayed gratification. Skill number two, emotional awareness and regulation. Skill number three, flexible thinking and problem solving. And last week we did our sense of self building a strong identity from birth.

Time management

How valuable is time management to you as you do all the things? Mothering, working, being a partner, prioritizing time for yourself, running a household, all the things. Without time management, you would be lost in a sea of what to do and no idea how to prioritize what to do first.

Practicing time management with your infants, toddlers, and preschoolers sets them up to have great success. When they transition outside of the home into a daycare, into a preschool, into a kindergarten classroom, it's about prioritizing time. What comes first, what comes next, and what comes after that. So how do we support tiny people to think this way?

Well, let's start with our infants.  Say you have a six, seven, eight month old. They love their bottle, right? Bottle time is the best time.  And somebody said the word milk.  Ruh roh. Maybe you signed the word milk and their little antennae went off. They know what's coming. In order to help them manage between the time that the sign has been produced or the word has been said until the bottle is in their hand, what can you do?  It's time to make a bottle. First, I will go to the kitchen. Then, I will heat up the milk. Then, I will put it in a bottle. And then you can drink it. What did you do for them?

You gave them the structure of what's happening first, second, and third.

The strategy here is don't go beyond three steps. There's a really good reason why stories have a beginning, middle,  and an end. Why we start something, do it, and finish it.  This three step system is just part of our natural environment. It's easy to manage. So, start there with them. Maybe you have a slightly older child, in their toddler years. And remember, we started this whole thing off weeks ago, talking about waiting and patience, which certainly blends in here, right?

So maybe you have a slightly older child and in this situation, they really are looking forward to bath time. They love bath time. It's like their favorite time of day, but it's not bath time yet. So you've said, "Oh, bath time happens after dinner. It's not dinner time yet. We have to wait for our bath. Let's make this plan.  What are the things we're going to do before bath happens?  We're going to play, then we'll have dinner. Then it is bath time, playtime, dinnertime, bath time".  You've put it inside a framework where they know what happens first, they know what happens next, and then they know that thing they really want is happening after that.

Toddlers, big toddlers or preschoolers, it's time to invite them into the organizational plan making. Why?  It's great when they're young to give them that concrete structure. It's predictable and they know what's coming. You want them to now practice these skills because they're old enough at two and a half, at three, at three and a half to start thinking about what might come first and second and third.

What choices could they make that would move the process along or solve a problem?

We talked about this in a different episode, how cognitive thinking and problem solving are flexible, but also time management comes in, right? You have to know what to do first if you're going to solve a problem. So if you have a three and a half year old and they are 100  percent committed to climbing up and sitting on the potty by themselves. They've just finished potty training, say, maybe they were late, a little bit late to potty training according to the norms out there, right? They are 100 percent wanting to sit inside their identity now that they know they can do this by themselves, but they're short. They just happen to be a short little human, and the potty seat is fairly tall, and you really want to swoop in. You really want to solve this for them, but you know this is an opportunity for them to practice flexible thinking and time management and problem solving. And so instead you say, "I see, you really want to do this by yourself. I know you can, I believe you can. What could you do to help yourself be tall enough to sit on that potty by yourself"?

Let the wheels turn, watch the wheels turn, give them a solid 15 to 30 seconds.  They may automatically say, I could go get the step stool from the kitchen, bring it to the bathroom, and use it to climb up. One, two, three steps that they came up with all by themselves. If that's what happens, celebrate with them, mama.

"You've solved that problem all by yourself. You thought about it, you found a solution". If not, you can go ahead and start the process through prompts. "Hmm, I wonder if we have a stepstool"? See what happens next. "You could go get the stepstool from the kitchen". See what happens next.  Go ahead and start prompting to help them make a plan. And when they do the celebration is, "Yes, I am so glad you put that plan together all by yourself".

Give them the win, please. We don't always have to be right.

In fact, we shouldn't. They shouldn't always be right, and we shouldn't always be right because we're learning and growing and teaching together.

I've so enjoyed working through this series, and I would love to hear from you. As always, follow the show, subscribe, rate it, and tell us what impact it's having in your life!