Do you ever feel like you are running your kids’ lives for them? Like if you stopped managing their time and telling them when to do things nothing would get done? I have always been a very hands on Mom, in fact sometimes a little too hands on for my kids’ good. Afterall, why make them do it when I know I can do it better, more efficiently, and with less drama than if I try to teach them to do it for themselves? I think as Moms some of us can fall into this trap (especially those of us Moms who are recovering perfectionists and control freaks). We want to raise self-sufficient adults, but it’s easy to forget that this involves teaching children how to do things for themselves. We have to remember to make space for our kids to fail and make a mess along the way because this is an important part of the learning process.
Over the summer we experimented with giving our boys more ownership of managing their time and responsibilities. They were 12 and 14 at the time so we were somewhat overdue in this experiment. We have been working on discovering what is satisfying and what is not, so giving them room to discover how they liked to manage their time seemed like an appropriate extension of learning about satisfaction.
We started out setting clear expectations of their responsibilities. Since I manage the family calendar digitally, I purchased a paper planner and wrote out all of their commitments with a note about their “ready by” time (in other words, when they needed to be ready to walk out the door). We set guidelines for their responsibilities each day (minimum of ___ minutes of reading, chores, take care of the dogs, feed yourself a balanced lunch, summer sports conditioning, etc.) as well as limits on how much screens they could consume in a day. Then it was up to them. They could choose their wake up time, and how to structure their day. They could choose to do the fun stuff whenever they wanted in the day so long as they had all of their responsibilities completed before dinner.
I work from home and so in previous summers I had been more involved, making them lunch, reminding them to get ready when we needed to leave for an appointment, telling them whether or not it was too close to dinner for a snack, and requiring them to get all of their responsibilities done before they could be on screens or play with a neighbor. So they had experience with their responsibilities already but this time they had the freedom to discover how they wanted to manage their time, what they wanted to do first and what was most satisfying.
Many mornings the boys used their full amount of video game time before even starting their day with breakfast. Sometimes they would do fun things all day and hit an hour before dinnertime and realize they ran out of time to accomplish their tasks. As the summer wore on they started saving time for their responsibilities, and even sometimes decided to get the work done before they went to play. Other times they forgot to look at the calendar and missed that they had an appointment that would take them out for the afternoon and hadn’t planned ahead to have time for what they needed to do with a shortened day.
We had lots of conversations about satisfaction. What was the most satisfying from your day? What was the least satisfying? It often came up that using all of their video game time in the morning wasn’t satisfying because they had all the work left for the day and had already used all their screens.
One of the maturity needs of children is feedback on their guesses, attempts and failures, which means we have to leave room for them to make guesses, attempt things and fail, and be available to process the outcomes with them so they can learn how they like to do things. Ideally we give this feedback from a place of peace rather than frustration, even if their choices impact us negatively. While life isn’t ideal (and I often fail to find my peace before giving feedback), it’s good to know that is the target we are aiming for even as we also extend grace to ourselves.
Letting my boys manage their time over the summer was a good growing experience for all of us even though it often felt uncomfortable. I was stretched in letting them make mistakes and they were stretched to figure out what wasn’t just fun but also satisfying.
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