HELP!!!

Our free ebook, Smooth and Easy Days, may give you some ideas. We also have many articles on habit training in our Learning Library that may be helpful.

Just a gentle reminder – your children are young and won’t master any habits yet. It is a long, consistent, life-long process. If I, as mom, still struggle with my own habit of attention or habit of orderliness, or any habit you think of – with decades of practice – then it is completely reasonable for my children to be nowhere near mastery of habits.

With that said, routine is the key to my sanity with 9 going on 10 kids. Right now my ‘littles’ are baby on the way, 1yo, 3yo, 5yo, 6yo. (The other kids are 8, 9, 11, 12, 16). Our entire day has anchor points that organize our days. Meal times, snack times, bed time, wake up time – consistency in these means that we have a ‘normal’ feeling happening every few hours all day long. Then between the anchors we have our usual activities. It may be that we always read aloud after morning snack or we always go outside in the afternoon or that we do a final pickup after dinner.

I’m not an out-of-the-house mom with littles. We keep home as the center of our days. We keep running around to a minimum (and routine – for example I grocery shop on Saturday mornings or we have Physical Therapy on Mondays. Saturday and Monday afternoons are for family activities – could be a special nature walk, visiting the zoo, going bowling, etc).