When we had three young children four and under, we went to a parenting seminar in which the wise teacher (Gregg Harris) taught us how to manage our day—and get in the things that are truly important to us: “Attach things that are important to you to something that is already in your schedule.”

I was a struggling young mom, trying to teach our little ones to obey, love each other, enjoy learning, be helpful, desire God’s Word, play creatively, and more. However, like many young stay-at-home moms, I had prioritizing and follow through problems. Mr. Harris’ advice helped me get a handle on my preschoolers’ days.

We came home from the seminar and began attaching our “priorities” to the things that were already in place. Some things are predictable in a day automatically; they are “constances,” so to speak. Children get up in the morning, eat three meals (and snacks!), take naps (more on that later!), and go to bed at night (more on that later, too!).

We chose the things that we truly wanted to make happen in our littles’ daily schedule: Bible reading in the morning; chore training; afternoon story time; etc. We attached these to the “constances” of our kids’ days, and before we knew it, we were having successful days…and we soon attached more things to our attachments until we were attaching to our attachments. And our days became one big, long attachment—getting to many of the things that were priorities in our hearts but were not happening in real life.

I have talked a lot about doing things with our children that teach them important Christian virtues and behaviors. It is easy to hear someone talk about these things, and think, Yeah, that sounds great….but it is easier said than done!

I’m here to tell you today that you can do this! If something is a true priority in your family’s life, you can make it happen, regardless of children’s ages, work schedules, financial situation, and more.

Take the most important thing to you that you know you should do with your children but never seem to get to. Daily devotions? Prayer time? Read aloud? Story time? Chore time? Morning routines? Talk time? Only choose one—and decide that this one thing will become a habit in your home.

Now choose the most constant scheduled activity in your family—rising, breakfast, lunch, after school snack, bedtime, etc. And attach your priority to that. Be realistic. Do not try to do everything at one time. Do not make it a long, drawn-out affair. Just start tomorrow doing the highest priority item attached to the most consistent “constant.”

Keep your activity short at first. If you choose to read a Bible story aloud while the kids eat breakfast each morning, get one of those One Minute Bible story books or some other quick read, and dig in and do it. Do not be discouraged if it is a five minute read. Do not be dismayed if you miss occasionally (the “more often than not” principle will be explained tomorrow!). Just do it!

Once you have some consistency with this, you can tackle another “attachment.” And so on and so forth. Before you know it, your home will be a center—a learning center, spiritual center, fun center, heart-affecting center—all of the things that the Christian home was designed to be. Don’t worry if you mess up—our children are quick to “catch us in inconsistencies,” and they will be sure to let you know that your “attachment” is slipping!

How have you managed to be consistent with important things in your home? Give us some of your tricks!

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It is so hard to believe that May is here! With so many winding down their school year and the busyness of summer upon us, we are going to make a couple of changes at Raising Kids With Character and Character Ink Press blog for a couple of months.

During May, June, and July, we will just have two Wondering Wednesdays (first and third Wednesdays) and two Freebie Fridays (second and fourth Fridays) as far as new podcasts, videos, and free products. We will resume weekly Wondering Wednesdays and weekly Freebie Fridays in August to help everybody get started back up in the fall.

So….don’t go away…we’ll still be here. We just know that with vacations, summer sports, Bible school, and more, people don’t have as much time to listen/watch—and oftentimes school gets put on the back burner.

Stay tuned as we continue our 52 Weeks of Talking to Your Kids; add more Meaningful Composition books; reveal our new Write On books in June (Write On, Peter Pan!); and much more!

Love and hope,
Donna

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Once the training of the chore is completed, the fun part of actually having someone consistently and correctly do the job begins. This will work out much better if you have set up a certain protocol that is followed to be sure that the chores that you have taught are actually completed and completed when needed.

We personally had three chore sessions a day before each meal for twenty minutes or so. We learned this approach from Greg Harris in his early Christian Homeschool Workshop (twenty-five years ago!) where he taught us to attach important things in our day to something that is already in the schedule. It felt natural to add a chore session before each meal.

This worked well for us because we had one person, Mom in the beginning, fixing meals during that time. When we added a chore session to that, it meant that everybody was working at the same time on various areas. It also meant there was a a starting point and an ending point.

Some families prefer to simply have a chore chart in which all the chores are assigned and they just need to be done by a certain time of day. That is another approach. I liked all together because it allowed everything to be done at the same time. It was also easier than trying to track down everybody at 3 o’clock and asked if this was done or that was done. Of course, this can be overcome by creating a chore chart in which the child marks off or moves something after he does it. (Assuming the checking is in place—don’t expect what you won’t inspect!)

Whatever approach you decide to take for your chore schedule, be sure that the chores are done regularly. Check out my blog post about three times a day – laundry, dishes, trash. For us personally, we like to give the daily work to younger children. Daily jobs give the child the opportunity to practice that chore over and over again each day. In this way, the child gets better and better at the jobs. They are also very visible as in you can see if the dishes are done or the trash is taken out. Also, they are needed every day, and generally speaking, younger children are around every day whereas older children might go out to a job or sports or extra classes.

If you have not had a true routine set up previously, the first place to start is definitely the dailies. There is no reason to have the coffee tables all dusted when you can’t walk through the living room. Likewise, it is very difficult to dust the room with clutter everywhere. In that way, I would begin training children on daily chores first and foremost. If each child just learned one daily task every couple of weeks, the daily tasks could be passed out, taught, and completed every day within a month’s time. This would make the school day run much more smoothly and give the children a sense of accomplishment and pride to have completed such important jobs.

→For a complete list of all ages and appropriate chores (including Working With Someone Else lists), see our Age-Appropriate Chores Poster Pack.

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At the end of a recent post “Time in a Bottle”, I promised a Timely Tip article, so here it is!

After thirty-two years of parenting (and thirty years of homeschooling, beginning with homeschooling my younger sister), we have learned a ton abut time management. Some of it we use every day. Other tips were used during certain seasons. And still others we use just occasionally. Here are “Five Timely Tips“ (in no certain order) that I hope will help parents find more time to train their children, love their children, play with their children, and just be WITH their children.

1. Attach things to things already in your schedule

Twenty-five years ago we were blessed to learn from an amazing family teacher, Gregg Harris. One of the things that he taught us that we began implementing immediately–and continue to use to this day–is the concept of attaching important things to things already in your schedule.

Mr. Harris said that our children (and we!) already eat three times a day; they already get up in the morning and go to bed at night. If we want to make something stick in our routines with them, attach that important activity (reading to them, devotions, talking together, etc.) to one of these “already-in-the-schedule-no-matter-what” activities).

We came home and started attaching things to our meals, rising times, and bed times–and before we knew it, we were attaching attachments to our attachments! It really worked!

We started out simple–just keeping a family devotional by the dinner table for one of us to read while the rest cleaned up the meal, moving the kids’ breakfast to the little table where I planted myself on the end and read as they ate, etc. But before we knew it, a little bit at a time, we were doing many wonderful things that we thought only really disciplined and perfect families did.

2. Watch out for time robbers

 In “Time in a Bottle,” I described how we would respond if someone were to break into our car and steal our wallet–and $100. We would be outraged! It would serve us well in our families to be a little bit more outraged by time robbers in our lives–those things that steal our time (or that we allow to steal our time).

The statistics on television viewing, “screen time,” and more are alarming when you consider the number of hours we spend on entertainment vs with our children. I like movies and entertainment as much as the next person, but, thankfully, we were taught by intentional parents many years ago that we cannot let entertainment overtake our lives–and pull us away from the important things in life–God, spouse, children, and others.

Rather than tell you to get rid of this or that, let me leave you with this thought about time robbers: If the latest stats about average weekly “screen time” of thirty-three hours per week per person are really true, can you imagine what would happen if any of us who are logging that kind of “recreational” screen time simply took half of that time to be with those we love, to truly raise our children, and to serve others and the Lord?

3. Understand Seasons of Life

The aforementioned Gregg Harris also taught us about an important concept concerning time and priorities: the seasons of life. At the time that we heard his teaching about doing things that are in “your season,” we were a young couple with four small children trying to do what “elders” should do–and wondering why there wasn’t time for everything.

Once we understood that our season was “babies and business” at that time, we were free–free to raise our children (and work really hard at that!) and free for Ray to work to earn a living, but not necessarily do everything else that men without four small kids were doing.

Guess what? We started to get good at what we were doing! We started being successful in our parenting–simply because we had the time to do what we really needed to do.

If you have trouble saying no to things that are obviously out of your season, I recommend that you get this teaching (Ebay?) and take it to heart. Even if you don’t get the entire teaching, consider these few paragraphs here. Are you continually trying to “fit it all in”? Maybe some things you are trying to do aren’t really for you right now.

4. Skip the good to do the best

This sort of goes along with Tip #3, but this, too, was a “great awakening” for our family. Everything looks “good”–all of the dozens of activities for our kids, many programs and hobbies for parents, even Bible studies and Christian groups. And now with the internet, we are bombarded with good things to do all the time–ways to make our home more beautiful, our food more healthful, our children more cleverly-dressed, and more.

And there is nothing wrong with any of those. But I would appeal to you that some of those things are good. But just good. That’s all. Good, but not best.

Each family has to determine what is their family’s “best.” Nobody but you and your spouse can do that. However, when we went through our family’s schedule and rated things as simply “good” and “yes, best,” it was another eye opener for us that allowed us to streamline our lives and make the most of our time.

Hint: The “bests” for all of us will include at least some time with our kids–and probably less running!  🙂

 5. Show your kids their value to you by giving them the greatest gift of all–-time

Okay, so you are tired of hearing me say this. But if you had unearthed the most amazing tool for raising children ever to be discovered, would you be able to keep quiet about it? Smile…. (Okay, maybe the Reishes didn’t “unearth” it, but we are still shouting it from the mountaintops anyway!)

In our parenting seminar (“Raising Kids With Character”), my husband loves to tell the story of Absalom in II Samuel. In summary, the people who came to the king for help kept stopping outside the gates and getting advice from Absolam. The verse says, “And on this manner did Absalom to all Israel that came to the king for judgment: so Absalom stole the hearts of the men of Israel” (Ii Sam. 15:6).

As Ray likes to tell it: What did Absalom do that allowed him to “steal the hearts” of the Israelites? He was available.

There is nothing that shows people their value to us like the giving of ourselves, the giving up of our time for them. This is true in the marriage relationship–and it is also true for our children. Our children will “give their hearts” (as in the Absalom story) to those who are available to them.

I am persuaded that one of the strongest factors in the relationships that we have with our teens and young adults (seven kids, ages sixteen through thirty-two) is our availability. They know that we will give up anything of our own to spend time with them. We show them their value to us by giving them the greatest gift–the gift of time.

I pray that this article helps families. If you are being helped by Character Ink publishing and “Raising Kids With Character,” tell your friends about us. (We are still Positive Parenting on Facebook.) Or host a parenting seminar in your church or community. And whatever you do, do the next right thing. 🙂

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