Kids vs. Time: How Routines Can Rescue The Day

One of the most consistent day-to-day annoyances I hear from parents is about their family’s relationship with TIME. The hardest moments occur when time constraints require everyone in the family to move with the same sense of urgency when clearly some members of the family didn’t get the memo.

A perfect example of this happens for many of us on weekday mornings.

While lots of adults have a pretty firm grasp on what needs to happen before school and work, kids can seem blissfully unaware that there’s any time pressure at all on weekday mornings– even when we tell them in no uncertain terms. One family with two working parents described to me the painstaking slowness of their young child carefully chewing each and every bite of her breakfast and taking dainty sips of juice while the adults rushed around the house preparing to shoot out the door the minute she was finished eating. Another parent described to me how her child becomes engrossed in exploring something random every single morning while the adults become increasingly frantic about their lateness. This plays out over and over in a hundred different ways, but often ends the same: the grown-ups yelling and the children crying.

There are a few big challenges here.

First, time is highly subjective. A minute with your best friend flies by in the blink of an eye, while a minute with a hungry tiger is interminable. This is even more true for children, many of whom have not even the slightest understanding of how time works (neither do I, to be perfectly transparent).

Second, priorities are highly subjective. It might be incredibly important that you get to work on time, but to your child that is infinitely less important than them choosing the exact right puzzle cube to bring to school that day. Trying to explain why work is more important than a puzzle cube choice is going to be a really hard sell to most kids.

And finally, the understanding of time is controlled largely by the frontal lobe, which is the absolute LAST part of the brain to fully develop. That means that children are not really capable of understanding how time works at all. This ability develops slowly over many years, so by the time they’re teenagers, they can be highly functional (actual results may vary). But for some people a tricky relationship with time persists well into adulthood. This is especially true of neurodivergent people; a major feature of ADHD is “time blindness.”

And yet, we often need our kids to operate on an adult timetable. They need to get up on time and get ready for the day. They need to get to school on time. We need to get to work on time. We have to pick them up on time, feed them on time, and get them to bed on time so they aren’t too tired to do it again tomorrow.

So adults who want to keep their jobs and their friends can’t wait around for their kids’ frontal lobes to develop. Most of us really do have to get places at set times.

What do we do?

While it’s true that we can’t speed up our kids’ frontal lobe development, there are some things we can do today to help our children begin to understand how time works. The most important thing we can do for our children is create reliable routines.

Kids and adults naturally lean into routines because knowing what’s going to happen next helps us feel safe and secure. A routine doesn’t have to be rigid to be dependable. For example, one client was having a terrible time getting the kids out of the house in the morning. When we broke down their existing morning routine, it varied widely from day-to-day. Sometimes the kids ate breakfast first, but sometimes they got dressed first. Other times they wanted to go to the bathroom right after getting up, while sometimes they waited until after they got dressed. The result was that the two young children were each doing whatever they felt like doing in the morning and they often ended up going in different directions at once. Then the parents had to make breakfast for one while the other was brushing their teeth, and when the first one went to get dressed, the other one was ready to eat. When it was time to leave, neither parent had any idea what had been accomplished by which child, and this usually led to some kind of last-minute breakfast, bathroom, or tooth-brushing intervention accompanied by a whole lot of yelling and fussing. It felt like chaos every day.

The parents were concerned that they and their kids would have a hard time sticking to a rigid routine, but they knew that what they were doing wasn’t working. So we worked together to create a morning routine that moved the children from the private areas of the house (bedroom/bathroom) toward the public areas of the house (kitchen/dining area), and then out the door. The kids could still decide what order they wanted to do things in the private area of the house, but when it was time to move on, they all moved downstairs to eat and pack their bags together. This resulted in much smoother, rhythmic, and predictable mornings, where everyone knew what was expected of them and when.

Other parents and kids prefer a more structured list of what to do and in what order. This might work well for kids who need a lot of step-by-step directions. Older kids who need and want a little more autonomy but who still need guidance might benefit from a daily schedule like in an elementary school classroom, with times of day and what’s going to happen at that time. Here’s an example of what a daily summer schedule looked like for one family:

If your children don’t need help with planning specific times of day or even whole days, they might still benefit from having some support in their weekly planning. In our house, we print and post a physical weekly calendar like the one below:

We record meetings, doctors appointments, and other family obligations. After school activities for each member of the family are also noted. This helps everyone know what’s going on in the family when they’re making plans with a friend or scheduling when (or when not) to do homework. Before our kids started to drive, this is where we recorded who was taking which kid where.

Whatever level of support your kids need in understanding how time works, it’s ideal for the person or people who are going to use the routine to take part in creating it. Even if their ideas aren’t as efficient as yours, participating in creating routines, lists of expectations, and timelines is the best way to begin understanding how time works. There is no better way to understand how much time things take than to experience it for themselves.