Hi, I'm Nicholeen Peck and I teach all about parenting, good communication,
family relationships, and even education all over the world through the lens of self
government and in this video, I'm talking about teaching time management to kids.
In this video, I'm going to be talking about why kids struggle with time management,
and when is the best time to start teaching them time management and then also, we're going to
talk about how to actually help them learn time management, and start keeping track of time
themselves. For years, I did treatment foster care for troubled teens, they were all between
the ages of 12 and 18 and do you know what, there were hardly any of those teens that were
actually really great at time management. That was something that I had to teach nearly all of them.
I won't say every one because there were a couple that could tie matters. But for the most part,
no, it was just a skill that they didn't have. They hadn't been taught yet. Also,
I've raised four children of my own, and I've actually homeschooled them, which means they had
to be in charge of a lot of their own education. This meant that they had to learn time management.
So how did I teach all of these children time management, that's what we're going to talk about.
But first, it's important for us to understand that it is difficult to learn time management.
In fact, it's probably one of the hardest skills that people learn. Come on, think about it. We all
know adults who are not great at time management. They're late to everything, they always say, oh,
well, I didn't get that done. They don't follow through with things. These are people who struggle
continually with working as part of a group. Sometimes they make things at work hard for their
co workers, because they just have a hard time with follow through. Well, there are different
personalities of people, we need to recognize that. There are some people that are planners,
they like to be planned, they look ahead for what's coming, and how much time they've got
and they make sure that they're prepared ahead of time, that's just part of their hardwiring,
or maybe even part of their nurturing, or how they were raised. Then there are other people who are
live in the moment people. These live in the moment people, they see that the sun is shining,
they want to go out and enjoy the sun and forget that maybe they had housework that needed to be
done, or a project for work that needed to happen. There are people who get talking with someone in
the lounge at the office, and they forget that they actually have a job to do at the office.
These are people who, whatever moment they're in, they just enjoy it and they make people feel
special too. So usually, these people have really great social skills, because they're willing to
take the time for the other people. So while they may not follow through naturally with things and
have to really rein themselves in to do it, they are really great at making people feel important
and they have social skills that oftentimes end up moving their business objectives forward,
even though they're not getting the to do lists done that's on the side.
So depending on personality, or maybe how someone was nurtured in their upbringing,
they might be more of a planner or more of a live in the moment person. Now the ideal
if a person can capitalize on the live in the moment experiences when it's the most important,
but then also have that plan in the back of their mind that they can be following through with.
When a person reaches full maturity, hopefully, they can have a nice mix of those two things,
so that they can accomplish all the things that they need to and keep in alignment with their
priorities, which hopefully involve the people. But children especially struggle with their
planning because number one, it has to be taught. Number two, they are spontaneous just by nature
as children. There are new experiences that are exciting. This throws them off course,
they get distracted very easily, because their prefrontal cortexes are very small.
And so emotional moments can jar them and throw them off track. Sometimes if they get stressed
about something like maybe a school subject, then suddenly they can get overwhelmed by stress,
and then not follow through with the school subject. So these are all things that take time
to get through and to develop. So when a person learns proper time management, it really is them
learning to develop themselves. We're going to talk about the best age to start time
management teaching and how to teach our children time management. But before we do,
click the subscribe button now. There are a lot of great videos on this channel that are dedicated to
helping you and your children communicate better and for everyone in the family
to learn proper self government, which really means self management. And that's why
we're talking about time management today. So click the subscribe button now and don't
forget that notification bell so that you're also notified when new videos come out. So how do we
teach time management to children and when should we start? Do you know what it's actually never too
early to start. So you are going to be the person that nurtures time management in your children.
If you are a person who likes to manage your time, then probably they will learn some of that just
from your nurturing. So if you live according to a kind of a schedule, now being careful to make sure
that we can keep our priorities straight. Because some people who live according to a schedule, get
so obsessed about the schedule that they forget to take time to bond and connect together with
the people, which should be our higher priorities, especially if we're focused on creating a united
family, which is what I am all about. Making sure that you say, hey, first thing in the day,
we're going to do this, then we're going to move on to this, we're going to get our chores
done probably around this time, we're going to have our food times probably around these times,
we're going to take some time to play, making sure that we schedule in downtime, time to just talk and
cuddle and communicate as a family. But if we make sure that we are prioritized as parents,
and we schedule in time for all the essentials, then our children will learn
that they can be very happy living according to a schedule. So this means that they will feel
less anxiety as they are growing up in our homes. Everyone loves to have some structure and when we
structure things for our children when they're younger than our children have less anxiety,
this helps them develop more responsibility for themselves. Instead of getting sidetracked
by all the feelings of overwhelm, or the upcoming to do lists that they might have for themselves
as they start to mature. Probably the best time to start talking really deliberately about time
management is when a child gets to the stage where they start having specific goals for themselves.
So when they're young, they live in the moment a lot and this can last until a person even hits
about age 12 or so but usually around age 12 we start talking about, okay, what are some
of our goals? What are our objectives or maybe these academic pursuits, or this hobby that we're
working on or we want to create better friend relationship, what should we do about that?
Now, you can start these conversations as early as I would say, maybe eight years old,
but usually for sure by age 12, you want to start having these conversations, and start
developing time blocks that they can schedule for themselves. If they make goals for themselves,
then they'll want to schedule their time blocks so that they can accomplish their goals. Otherwise,
it will feel very unfulfilling to even set a goal because they won't ever follow through.
The book that I'm most known for is this book here called Parenting A House United. In this book,
I talk about certain skills that we teach children in order to help them learn self government. There
are four basic skills that we teach children to help them learn to conquer all of their negative
behavior problems. Those four basic skills that I taught to children of all ages, even 17 year
olds that came to my home, even two year olds that are barely learning to talk. The four basic
skills are following instructions, accepting "no" answers and criticism, accepting consequences
and disagreeing appropriately. So how do these four basic skills help with time management? Well,
a person who is self governed gives themselves "no" answers on a regular basis. If they get a
distraction that comes in and is going to throw off their schedule, they give themselves a "no"
answer about that distraction and then they give themselves an instruction for what they should
do to follow through with their plan schedule. Learning how to accept no answers from parents
and follow instructions from parents is going to prepare a child to give themselves "no" answers
and to follow their own instructions when they are trying to do time management for themselves.
So teaching those four basic skills and correcting the children and praising the children,
when things go wrong or right is going to help them learn to correct themselves.
And notice when they're doing good at following through with their skill development too
and it will prepare them to empower them to do it for themselves moving forward. So make sure
you teach your children what self government is and isn't so that they can also be prepared
to know which direction they're going. When children know the why behind doing these things
like following instructions and accepting "no" answers, which is living that principle of self
government and having the freedom that comes with that, then they're more motivated to do
the things like scheduling their lives that will lead them to proper self government. In the book
Parenting A House United, I talked about having regular mentor sessions with my children.
So every week we have a meeting. Our mentor meeting is the time where we talk about all of
their different goals and their commitments that they want to make as they get a little bit older.
So in this book, our mentor journal, each child has one of these books
and they have a schedule in them for the week. They talk about their fun goals,
their spiritual goals, their academic goals, their social goals, relationship goals, behavior goals,
even have a place to make commitments, set dates with parents, and establish new goals
with Mom and Dad. It's a time to catch up with the parents on how I'm doing with my goals,
and a time to set new goals or objectives for the upcoming week. So every single Sunday afternoon,
me and my husband would have these one on one meetings with our children. They were personal
planning meetings just for them. They loved those meetings, those meetings were times where we could
talk about anything. They were completely safe places, there weren't going to be times where we
would get upset with them. Not that we ever did anyway, because we're really calm parents. But
it wasn't a time where we were going to be loading on criticism or anything like that. It was a time
where we were going to talk to them about who they thought they were, where they were going and
what they needed from us in order to accomplish that, and what type of skill development maybe
we could help them learn so that they could accomplish their goals and objectives in life.
And then every single day as they would plan their free time, they would refer back to their mentor
journal, and to that meeting they had with us and maybe even tell us before their free time, hey,
during my independent study time today, I'm going to be reading this book or I'm going to work
on these math lessons because that's what I've planned for the week to get this many math lessons
done and then they would check up with us at the end, and maybe even put checkmarks by the sight
of the things that they accomplished that we had talked about in their weekly meeting. So having a
weekly meeting with your child is really valuable. So let's recap if you have good time management
if you're at least working on your time management and you talk about time management with your
children, that's going to help them. Also if you teach them how to give themselves "no" answers,
follow instructions and correct themselves and praise themselves over time, they are going
to be able to not only do those things with you, but also start using those skills just
with themselves, which leads to greater maturity. Also make sure that you prioritize in your family
because priorities help people better manage their time. Also having meetings, times where we make a
deliberate plan and have deliberate follow through are going to be very powerful moments when you're
helping your child. If you've loved this video, I know that you're going to love my next video
which goes into more detail about the skills that your children need for self government.
That video is called the not so known secret for parenting success. Click on the link to that
video now and I'll see you there.