Morning and nighttime routines are beneficial for the whole family, reducing stress for caregivers, teaching children responsibilities and good habits, and fostering a sense of independence. However, it can be hard to get your kid to buy into sticking with a routine if there are more fun things that they could be doing.
At this point, you will have identified the tasks that must be completed in the morning or nighttime routine. Writing out these tasks in a simple and specific way, with anchor times indicated, will allow for a great starting point for collaborating with your child to make the routine agreeable to them. Discuss each step in the routine with specifics and provide reasons for why each task is important. Then, ask your child if they have anything that they feel is necessary to add to the schedule to ensure a good night’s sleep or a good day at school. With a younger child, getting their input may not be an important step, as they likely won’t have much to add. But for older kids, providing this opportunity to have some input in the routine can create a sense of agency, and you're building awareness of what is important to your child that you can attend to each day. If you are flexible with what order these tasks can be completed in, you can let your older child decide, so that they have a larger role in designing how the routine will work. Encouraging your child’s involvement helps the routine seem less like rules that don’t make sense to them, and more like a plan and schedule that they feel motivated to engage in. When your child is very young, this may feel less applicable, but as they get older, giving increased agency can help teach them responsibility, time management, and increase independence. To ensure that the routine is developing alongside your child, revisit it periodically and collaboratively plan for what needs to change for it to be successful.
Once you and your child share an understanding of how the routine will flow, you can make it into a creative project to further personalize it. Work with your child to turn the ideas into a tangible checklist with visuals for younger kids, or a daily to-do list for older kids. They can add photos that they like, create a theme, and decide where to keep their checklist. This is an opportunity to make it fun! You can use a whiteboard, notebooks, paper in a plastic protector that you can write on with a dry-erase marker, or to do lists on the phone. The vehicle for the physical reminder does not matter, as long as it works for your child, so they can remind themselves of the tasks that need to be completed without asking an adult for further clarification. For kids who struggle with time-management, tasks can be assigned times, and a timer can be given to the child or set by an adult, to ensure that the child stays on task.
These visual aids can be fun for kids to create, and they can be a useful tool for caregivers to track progress throughout the morning or nighttime routines. If reward systems work for your kids, these visual aids can create a great management system for providing rewards and incentives to encourage independent completion of routine tasks. When you are building a reward system, you want to ensure that the guidelines to earning rewards are clear, and that rewards are attainable. Work with your child to identify rewards they are motivated to earn and identify reasonable goals that they can achieve and continue to grow beyond.
Want to learn more?
- Book an appointment for treatment
- Contact us
- Watch our routines webinar
- Read The Core Ingredients in Morning and Nighttime Routines