Jade
April 16th 2003, 01:51 PM
How to Manage Your Time, Children and Sanity (Part 1) (http://www.family.org/pplace/newparent/a0022886.cfm)
By Allie Pleiter
It's just us.
Us, and them, and a whole lot of hours.
Hours in the middle of the night; hours stretching into summer's hot, sticky afternoons; hours on the tenth day of nonstop rain. Hours.
Time. Parenting is a lot about filling time. Filling it with good things, useful things. Silly and serious things. As a new parent, it is about looking at time in a whole new way. The bottom line is, time isn't yours anymore. Your time is no longer your own. You share it. And that little person doesn't exactly have the same interests and needs as you.
When my first was born, I found this shift particularly difficult. I was a time-manager. I conquered time to my advantage. Now, it felt like time had me over a barrel. Not enough time in many ways, too much in countless others. It took 20 minutes just to get out to the car to go anywhere. Run an errand? Ha! Dropping off film at the drugstore took almost the whole morning. Being on time for anything? Nearly impossible. The well-groomed control-freak in me was coming undone weeks before the end of my first maternity leave. And I did not go quietly. I did not acquiesce gracefully to my new role. I fought it kicking and screaming until my frustration level choked me.
Why? Because I felt like I was no longer in charge. That wasn't true, of course, but it was an emotional reaction. The truth was I was still in charge; I just had new needs to meet that were wildly different from what I had known. Being in charge means you plan for it to take 20 minutes to get yourself and your offspring out the door, not kick yourself into hysteria because you can't get out the door in 10 minutes. Your authority hasn't changed, just the operating procedures.
The Danger of Winging It
Yes, you may have lost a great deal of your spontaneity, but you now have a crash course in scheduling and planning. Time is as much your friend as your enemy. For some children, some babies, "winging it" comes naturally. They can just go along for the ride in whatever you need to do. The fact that you just carry them around works in your favor (if your children are not old enough to either walk or object, you'll soon long for the days when it was just a matter of lugging the baby carrier around). Even that portability, though, can't override a nap schedule or a sensitive child's temperament on a permanent basis. Predictability helps young children cope. Sooner or later, each of us learns that schedule and routine are not words to describe a rut; they're words that describe a framework.
You are in charge. Most times you know what's best for your kids. If you're looking for permission to do things your kids hate you for, I'll be the first one to give it to you. The time your child insists he doesn't need a nap is often the time he most needs one. 68 Sixty-eight Oreos do not constitute a lunch, no matter how many times it is requested. And if you say your child is too tired to go to the park, then she is too tired to go to the park. Period. Chief Home Officers (CHOs) know authority is no popularity contest. Even though I often listen to my children and try to remain flexible, I regularly pull rank. I remember that I was here first, I have their well-being at heart, and it is my job to plan, their job is to follow.
When I hear wails of protest from my troops, I love to lay blame on Big Bad Mommy School, that dark and dangerous place where all mothers learn such horrors as the virtues of vegetables, baths, curfews, naps, and candy restrictions. A mother friend of mine created this wonderful scapegoat and I use it frequently. I graduated magna cum laude from Big Bad Mommy School. I gave the valedictorian address. Mommies across America subscribe to its rules of conduct. And now that she's 9, Amanda has just about figured out that it doesn't really exist. Almost.
Especially when I had my second, I learned to make friends with my constraints. I learned that planned time made for an easier day. We needed to stay busy to stay sane and remind ourselves we were members of the human race. The trick became to find a level of activity that kept Amanda and I happy but wasn't too much for sensitive baby Christopher. I ended up breaking up the day into manageable chunks." We slowly came to the realization that we could do well with three chunks morning midday afternoon.
We started by setting a morning routine. Even when I had been up all night with colicky Christopher (CJ), giving some framework to our mornings helped us keep it all together. We chose to anchor our routine to Amanda's favorite PBS morning show. For some reason preschoolers can handle time concepts when wrapped around TV shows (yes, I know, this doesn't speak well of our culture, but you've got to work with what you've been given). So I looked at the broadcast time for Amanda's favorite show and divided up the morning into things that needed to be done before the show could be watched and what could be done afterward. I packaged these tasks with a mind to what CJ was doing at about that time so we could take advantage of coordination.
Such two-fisted thinking meant that Amanda and I ate breakfast together most mornings, snatching a bit of "just us" time while CJ slept. We tried to do things in the same order every morning. Amanda put up less of a fight getting dressed if she knew it came every day after TV. All three of us tried to get ourselves out somewhere each morning by around 10:30, when CJ woke up from his morning nap. And so it went throughout our day.
Another helpful trick was to set certain days for certain things. Tuesday mornings were for the library. Fridays were our days for playdates. Setting playdate days kept her from hounding me all week. If you don't have a child over four, you will not yet understand the particular agony of this repeated request. Any child from ages 5 to 13 will tell you that life is just plain insufferable, if they don't have a friend over every waking minute. A designated day helped Amanda and me keep our cool and show a semblance of patience.
This scheduling is harder than just sorting it out in your own head. Like most 4-year-olds, Amanda had a paper-thin grasp of time. "Not now" or "in a minute" or "on Thursday" meant nothing to her. She lived only in the here and now. I could not find ways to explain to her that we couldn't go to the park eight times a day or that lunch wasn't for another hour or that preschool was on Tuesday, not today. One day, in desperation, I began to draw her pictures. I made seven rectangles for the days of the week. I began to draw in the parts of our week that were fixed—preschool, etc. Looking at her, I could see the little light bulb go on inside her head. Amanda had to see time. She is still a visual learner—even at nine, so I had to discover ways to show her time.
We made little symbols for the things in her week: playdates, going to the library, grocery shopping, the park, and swimming. She could grasp her week that way. She could look at those rectangles and understand that preschool was tomorrow, not today. Eventually I went to the office supply store and found one of those dry-erase schedule boards. I discovered that Colorforms (remember Colorforms?) stuck to dry erase boards. Now she could move a Colorforms circle through her rectangles to see where she was in her week.
And, perhaps more importantly, it forced us to sit down each Monday and plot out what the week would be like. I could see where the holes were in our schedule (yawning gaps of time just ripe for boredom and chaos) and find things to fill them—or to have on hand when down time just wasn't exciting enough. All this leads me to another basic truth of parenting: Planning is everything.
You can blow off a plan if you decide that's best. Sometimes the most astounding fun comes in a spontaneous decision. On the other hand, you can rarely drum up a plan the instant it's needed. Parenting takes planning. Gobs and gobs of it. If you were never a manager with planning responsibilities, you've got to learn them now. It's that delightful, excruciating knife-edge between the well-laid plan shot to ruins and the chaos of no plan at all. That's the daily existence we live as parents.
Plan your day. Plan your meals. Plan your fun. Hey, now that you have kids, you'll even have to plan your sex life (I told myself I wasn't going to get into that…). I find I can let my planning requirements choke me, or I can learn to love them as my best defense against chaos.
(To be continued next week)
By Allie Pleiter
It's just us.
Us, and them, and a whole lot of hours.
Hours in the middle of the night; hours stretching into summer's hot, sticky afternoons; hours on the tenth day of nonstop rain. Hours.
Time. Parenting is a lot about filling time. Filling it with good things, useful things. Silly and serious things. As a new parent, it is about looking at time in a whole new way. The bottom line is, time isn't yours anymore. Your time is no longer your own. You share it. And that little person doesn't exactly have the same interests and needs as you.
When my first was born, I found this shift particularly difficult. I was a time-manager. I conquered time to my advantage. Now, it felt like time had me over a barrel. Not enough time in many ways, too much in countless others. It took 20 minutes just to get out to the car to go anywhere. Run an errand? Ha! Dropping off film at the drugstore took almost the whole morning. Being on time for anything? Nearly impossible. The well-groomed control-freak in me was coming undone weeks before the end of my first maternity leave. And I did not go quietly. I did not acquiesce gracefully to my new role. I fought it kicking and screaming until my frustration level choked me.
Why? Because I felt like I was no longer in charge. That wasn't true, of course, but it was an emotional reaction. The truth was I was still in charge; I just had new needs to meet that were wildly different from what I had known. Being in charge means you plan for it to take 20 minutes to get yourself and your offspring out the door, not kick yourself into hysteria because you can't get out the door in 10 minutes. Your authority hasn't changed, just the operating procedures.
The Danger of Winging It
Yes, you may have lost a great deal of your spontaneity, but you now have a crash course in scheduling and planning. Time is as much your friend as your enemy. For some children, some babies, "winging it" comes naturally. They can just go along for the ride in whatever you need to do. The fact that you just carry them around works in your favor (if your children are not old enough to either walk or object, you'll soon long for the days when it was just a matter of lugging the baby carrier around). Even that portability, though, can't override a nap schedule or a sensitive child's temperament on a permanent basis. Predictability helps young children cope. Sooner or later, each of us learns that schedule and routine are not words to describe a rut; they're words that describe a framework.
You are in charge. Most times you know what's best for your kids. If you're looking for permission to do things your kids hate you for, I'll be the first one to give it to you. The time your child insists he doesn't need a nap is often the time he most needs one. 68 Sixty-eight Oreos do not constitute a lunch, no matter how many times it is requested. And if you say your child is too tired to go to the park, then she is too tired to go to the park. Period. Chief Home Officers (CHOs) know authority is no popularity contest. Even though I often listen to my children and try to remain flexible, I regularly pull rank. I remember that I was here first, I have their well-being at heart, and it is my job to plan, their job is to follow.
When I hear wails of protest from my troops, I love to lay blame on Big Bad Mommy School, that dark and dangerous place where all mothers learn such horrors as the virtues of vegetables, baths, curfews, naps, and candy restrictions. A mother friend of mine created this wonderful scapegoat and I use it frequently. I graduated magna cum laude from Big Bad Mommy School. I gave the valedictorian address. Mommies across America subscribe to its rules of conduct. And now that she's 9, Amanda has just about figured out that it doesn't really exist. Almost.
Especially when I had my second, I learned to make friends with my constraints. I learned that planned time made for an easier day. We needed to stay busy to stay sane and remind ourselves we were members of the human race. The trick became to find a level of activity that kept Amanda and I happy but wasn't too much for sensitive baby Christopher. I ended up breaking up the day into manageable chunks." We slowly came to the realization that we could do well with three chunks morning midday afternoon.
We started by setting a morning routine. Even when I had been up all night with colicky Christopher (CJ), giving some framework to our mornings helped us keep it all together. We chose to anchor our routine to Amanda's favorite PBS morning show. For some reason preschoolers can handle time concepts when wrapped around TV shows (yes, I know, this doesn't speak well of our culture, but you've got to work with what you've been given). So I looked at the broadcast time for Amanda's favorite show and divided up the morning into things that needed to be done before the show could be watched and what could be done afterward. I packaged these tasks with a mind to what CJ was doing at about that time so we could take advantage of coordination.
Such two-fisted thinking meant that Amanda and I ate breakfast together most mornings, snatching a bit of "just us" time while CJ slept. We tried to do things in the same order every morning. Amanda put up less of a fight getting dressed if she knew it came every day after TV. All three of us tried to get ourselves out somewhere each morning by around 10:30, when CJ woke up from his morning nap. And so it went throughout our day.
Another helpful trick was to set certain days for certain things. Tuesday mornings were for the library. Fridays were our days for playdates. Setting playdate days kept her from hounding me all week. If you don't have a child over four, you will not yet understand the particular agony of this repeated request. Any child from ages 5 to 13 will tell you that life is just plain insufferable, if they don't have a friend over every waking minute. A designated day helped Amanda and me keep our cool and show a semblance of patience.
This scheduling is harder than just sorting it out in your own head. Like most 4-year-olds, Amanda had a paper-thin grasp of time. "Not now" or "in a minute" or "on Thursday" meant nothing to her. She lived only in the here and now. I could not find ways to explain to her that we couldn't go to the park eight times a day or that lunch wasn't for another hour or that preschool was on Tuesday, not today. One day, in desperation, I began to draw her pictures. I made seven rectangles for the days of the week. I began to draw in the parts of our week that were fixed—preschool, etc. Looking at her, I could see the little light bulb go on inside her head. Amanda had to see time. She is still a visual learner—even at nine, so I had to discover ways to show her time.
We made little symbols for the things in her week: playdates, going to the library, grocery shopping, the park, and swimming. She could grasp her week that way. She could look at those rectangles and understand that preschool was tomorrow, not today. Eventually I went to the office supply store and found one of those dry-erase schedule boards. I discovered that Colorforms (remember Colorforms?) stuck to dry erase boards. Now she could move a Colorforms circle through her rectangles to see where she was in her week.
And, perhaps more importantly, it forced us to sit down each Monday and plot out what the week would be like. I could see where the holes were in our schedule (yawning gaps of time just ripe for boredom and chaos) and find things to fill them—or to have on hand when down time just wasn't exciting enough. All this leads me to another basic truth of parenting: Planning is everything.
You can blow off a plan if you decide that's best. Sometimes the most astounding fun comes in a spontaneous decision. On the other hand, you can rarely drum up a plan the instant it's needed. Parenting takes planning. Gobs and gobs of it. If you were never a manager with planning responsibilities, you've got to learn them now. It's that delightful, excruciating knife-edge between the well-laid plan shot to ruins and the chaos of no plan at all. That's the daily existence we live as parents.
Plan your day. Plan your meals. Plan your fun. Hey, now that you have kids, you'll even have to plan your sex life (I told myself I wasn't going to get into that…). I find I can let my planning requirements choke me, or I can learn to love them as my best defense against chaos.
(To be continued next week)