The term "time management" has become particularly popular in recent years, and by now, it has evolved to the 5th generation of time management theory. Maybe it's because we're in an age of knowledge explosion, and we always feel like "my life is limited, knowledge is infinite"; or because there are so many complicated and trivial things in the working day, we always feel helpless, so we once wanted to try to do a good job of time management. But on the way to becoming a master of time, many people accidentally fell into the pit, as if they could not manage their time well, let alone look at the children who are always procrastinating, but they have no way to start.
It often happens in our lives that homework that could have been completed in an hour may last five hours because the child is slow and inattentive. As parents, we must endure anger, accompany not to say, the child's sleep is still greatly affected, the next day to listen to the class has no spirit.
Not only studying, but also in life, going out in the morning has to be urged, even small things like brushing teeth and washing face, many children can ink for more than half an hour. No matter how anxious we are, no matter how reasonable we are, the children will not be able to get up.
So why is the child always like a chronic child, doing everything grinding and rubbing, what ways can help children realize the importance of time and manage their own time? Today we will talk about the book "Children's Time Management Training Manual", which is co-authored by several authors.
Each of these authors is a senior parent-child education expert and psychological counselor, the first author of which is Zhong Sijia, a doctor of educational psychology from the University of Oregon in the United States, and a senior family education expert in Taiwan.
As for this book, there is also a very noteworthy place, that is, these authors also have a very rich experience in front-line education, and have helped many children and parents solve the problem of time management offline. That is to say, the methods provided in the book have been verified many times to be feasible and usable.
In this book, the author introduces a set of time management training programs for children aged four to eighteen, as long as thirty days, that is, four weeks, we can help children establish a concept of time, so that their work efficiency can be significantly improved, so that children can learn well, and have time to go out and play happily. After learning this set of methods in the book, even if you can't manage your time well, you can teach your child to manage his time.
This time management training program is divided into four weeks, which means that we are going to divide it into four steps.
First, help your child establish a sense of time.
Second, speed up the child's work.
Third, improve the accuracy of children's work.
Fourth, improve the efficiency of children's work.
Before starting the four-week training, the author spends an entire chapter reminding parents to be mentally prepared. Time management training requires us to guide the child, and we must be willing to spend at least ten to thirty minutes a day communicating with the child and helping the child to train in order to achieve the goal more effectively.
So you first have to have love and patience. Children's perception of time is relatively weak, the ability to maintain concentration for a long time is worse than that of adults, many times, they are not subjectively procrastinating, but really can not correctly recognize and control time. This ability needs to be cultivated slowly, we adults must understand the child, even if we encounter difficulties in training, we must avoid losing our temper with the child.
Secondly, in order to avoid transferring negative emotions to children, we parents must do a good job of emotional management. So what do we do when we feel like we're about to get angry? The book talks about a very interesting and very easy to operate method, called one away from two sucking three cool water.
To leave is to close your mouth and step out of your legs. When we become aware of our emotions, we must quickly leave the child or place that makes us angry. For example, we can go to the bedroom, the balcony, and be quiet. Children are afraid when they see us angry, and they don't have the heart to listen to us.
The second inhalation means that we can use deep breathing to relax ourselves. Let's say we take a deep breath in the mirror in the bathroom, adjust it, and wait for the mood to gradually return to calm and the expression to become peaceful. We go out to communicate with the children again, and generally after the first two steps, we can calm down.
If you are particularly angry and still can't calm down, you can wash your face with cool water, or drink a little cold boiled water, which is three cool waters. In short, we must first restore our own sanity, and then deal with the various situations of our children.
Don't ignore these reminders from the author, it's important to be mentally prepared. Because the improvement of time management ability is not a day's work, you can think about how difficult it is when we try to do time management ourselves.
Next, we will take a look at how this 30-day child time management training program is implemented. The author divides this plan into four weeks, one goal per week, from simple to complex, giving the child enough time to adapt.
In the first week our goal is to help children establish a sense of time. Just now we said that children's perception of time is relatively poor. During the week, all we have to do is help children perceive time, transform the invisible time into time that the child can feel. For example, we can put an hourglass in front of the child and put a clock, so that the concept of time is no longer so abstract in the child's mind.
During the week, we'll learn how to keep a time journal for your child, use time ABC to sift through the tasks your child needs to complete each day, and then work with your child to make a schedule.
We parents can help our children identify everything they want to do by keeping a diary of their children's daily time. So how is the time diary written? It is very simple, it is to record in detail what the child does every day, how much time each thing takes, from getting up to going to bed, big things and small things do not fall behind.
At the same time, we can also record the child's performance after each task, such as getting up at half past six, taking forty minutes, and rubbing, so that after a week, we can roughly know what the child has to do every day and where their time is wasted.
After sorting out the tasks that your child needs to complete every day, we can help your child prioritize these tasks. This is actually the same principle as the adult time management method, that is, to ensure that there is enough time to do the most important things, and then consider the things that are not so important.
At this step, we can use one of the methods provided in the book, the time ABC method first divides things into three categories of ABC according to important and urgent situations, and then reasonably prioritizes the items.
The author believes that for children, eating well, sleeping well, learning well, and playing well are the most important things. So, Category A tasks include eating a healthy diet, getting enough sleep, completing school assignments, and having appropriate autonomy.
Here, by the way, why it is important to let children have an autonomous time. Some parents like to arrange their children's schedule very full, thinking that this way can make their children not waste every minute. In fact, this is very unscientific, because the human brain nerves can not always be in a state of tension, you need to reduce stress and relax, in order to maintain good operation.
If the child's spirit is always very tight, it will have a very bad impact on the body and psychology. For children in the lower and middle grades, there must be at least one hour of autonomous time every day from Monday to Friday. During this time, the child can make his own decisions completely and do whatever he wants. As long as he doesn't disturb others or do something bad, even if he is just there in a daze, lying down, doing something particularly childish, it doesn't matter. These are among the most important Category A tasks.
Class B tasks are relatively less important or less urgent. For example, exercise appropriately to make friends, family and friends to gather, and so on. Class C tasks, on the other hand, continue to decrease on the basis of class B tasks, generally referring to things that are neither urgent nor important. For example, extracurricular assignments, practicing the piano, learning calligraphy, and so on.
When we help our children with tasks, we must consider them according to the priority of this ABC. For example, under the premise of ensuring that children have enough sleep, they first complete school homework, ensure that children have their own independent time, then appropriate exercise, and finally extracurricular homework, practice calligraphy and other tasks.
If there are special circumstances, such as the need for more revision time before the midterm and final exams, you can first subtract the C-type tasks, such as the Olympic number class, practice which to learn and so on. Then appropriately reduce the B task, such as shortening the time of dating and exercise, but at any time can not reduce the A task, such as sleep and autonomy time, because these are the basis for the healthy growth of children.
Once we have figured out what our children need to do on a daily basis, we parents can work with our children to set a schedule for each day. List the tasks that need to be completed each day one by one, and then schedule a reasonable time for each task to complete. The timetable is set, and from next week, we will implement it. At this point, many parents run into a problem where their children aren't interested in setting a schedule.
This book tells such an example, after the mother of the child Xiaofei formulated the schedule, Xiaofei only looked at it, and then pushed it away with particular disgust, and said very impatiently, I don't want this schedule. Why? It turned out that when Xiaofei's mother formulated this schedule, she did not discuss with Xiaofei, but directly listed the table to Xiaofei, and said to Xiaofei that her mother made a schedule, and we will do it according to this every day in the future. Xiaofei listened to it, and felt that this watch was a tool that her mother wanted to restrain herself, and she immediately had a rebellious psychology.
Later, Xiaofei's mother said to Xiaofei, the child's mother thinks that you have too little time to play every day, so her mother made a schedule to help you save more time to play the game, and when we have completed the above tasks, we can play freely, the faster it is completed, the longer the time to play, how. XiaoFei quickly raised his interest and started this time-saving game with his mother.
We all know that children are naturally free, and they don't like to be disciplined. When making a schedule, many children will have such a reaction as Xiaofei. If we do not consider the child's mood and force the child to perform, the effect will be counterproductive.
At this time, we parents need to use more brains and find ways to let children participate. A method like Xiaofei's mother is very good, she said that this thing is a very fun thing, but also for Xiaofei's sake. Xiaofei felt interested and was naturally willing to participate.
Well, after the first week of training, we parents have an understanding of the basic situation of the child, but also clarified the tasks that the child needs to complete every day, and worked with them to develop a schedule, so that they have a preliminary concept of time.
That's in the second week, our goal is to help children do things faster. This section will use three tools: a timetable, a red star, a gift table, and a chat about how to reward your child materially and spiritually.
Let's first look at how the schedule works. From this week on, we need to supervise our children every day to complete the tasks on the schedule and record the time spent. Before doing so, we parents have to check the schedule prepared for the previous week to see if it includes the following four items.
1. The name of each task.
Second, the actual time to complete this task.
Third, the standard time to complete this task, that is, the parents estimate a reasonable time for the child to be able to complete the task through the observation of the previous week.
Fourth, after completing the task, you can save the time.
In the beginning, we patiently explain to the child what each item means, and then tell the child that as long as he can complete the task in advance and save the time, he can be at his own discretion. This allows children to feel very intuitively that it is worthwhile to complete the task in advance.
It should be noted that we parents should talk and count, do not add additional tasks because the children are doing fast, we must fulfill our promises, let the time saved become the child's independent time, and do not let the child complete in advance, and pick faults in the quality of the homework.
At this stage, our goal is to find out as quickly as possible what the child is capable of and see how quickly they can do things. At the next stage, let's focus on quality. When the child completes the task, we parents should encourage the child more.
There are two ways to encourage that we can learn from. The first form of encouragement is material encouragement, allowing children to redeem gifts through their good performance. We parents can design a red star table for our children, and if the child completes the task within the standard time, they can get the corresponding number of red stars as a reward. For example, if you get dressed as soon as the alarm clock rings, you can get a red star, you can go out on time in the morning, you can get a red star, you can complete your homework on time every day, you can also get a red star.
At the same time, we can also make a gift table for the child, writing down how many red stars are needed for each gift. After the child has accumulated a certain number of red stars, they can follow the gift table to find the parents to cash in.
This kind of material encouragement method, which all of our parents generally use, will have a very good effect on mobilizing the enthusiasm of children. However, some parents use the same method but the effect is not good, and the children do not buy it.
At this time, we must pay attention to whether the gifts we listed are not what the children like, or the exchange standards we designed are too high, and the children feel that even if they work hard, they may not be able to achieve it for a long time, and the best way is to let the children write down the gifts they want, and then confirm a reasonable exchange standard for themselves.
Of course, both the Red Star and the Gift Watch are external drivers, and we ultimately want our children to truly enjoy the process of learning and fall in love with learning. This requires our parents to learn to give their children more spiritual encouragement, stimulate their children's sense of achievement and self-motivation, and make them more motivated.
This requires the second form of encouragement, verbal encouragement from parents. Usually, many parents encourage their children to habitually say, you are awesome, you are too good. In fact, such encouragement is often only a passing pass, and does not reflect where the child is doing well, so correspondingly, the sense of achievement that the child can get from the encouragement is relatively weak.
So how can you encourage your child more effectively? The book talks about a method called encouraging syllogism. We as parents might as well give it a try. Encouraging syllogism means that in the encouragement of our parents, we should include three points: good phenomena, good feelings, and good behavior.
For example, if the child finishes the homework twenty minutes in advance, we can encourage him to first describe the good phenomenon we see, that is, to see you complete the homework twenty minutes ahead of schedule, and then describe our good feelings, proud of the child, and very happy; and finally use specific words to describe the child's good behavior, for example, your English homework is written faster than yesterday, and even the most headache math homework is written on time today.
Among these three points, good behavior needs to be emphasized. If you don't know how to say the specifics, you can ask your child, hey, how did you do it? In the process of offline practice, the author found this sentence particularly magical, which can both guide children to think more and make them more willing to repeat good behaviors.
Why is this phrase so useful? Let's look at an example from the book, Doudou has been writing his homework very slowly, spending at least four hours a day. One day Doudou actually advanced an hour in advance, finished the homework, the mother was very confused, she asked him, Doudou, you finished your homework so quickly today, saving yourself an hour of playing time, so powerful, how did you do it?
Doudou was particularly happy to say, Mom, when the school was in class today, I didn't go out to play, Wrote a part, and when I got home, I quickly wrote the rest, and I didn't watch cartoons in the middle, I didn't eat snacks, I wrote it in a moment. You see, when we ask the child in a praise tone, how do you do it? In fact, it is a deeper communication with the child, which not only guides the child to think about his efforts and efforts, but also allows him to actively express it.
Psychological research shows that people's behavior is constantly reinforced, and the more good behaviors a child says, the more likely it is that he will do it again. The next time your child has a good performance, you can try this method.
Next, we will start the third week of training, and in the third week our goal is to help children improve their accuracy.
After the first two weeks of training, the child's speed of doing things will increase somewhat, but some things the child does faster, but the quality decreases. So this week, we need to cultivate the patience and care of our children, so that they can not only do it faster, but also do better. When implementing this step, first introduce two methods, one is to use the method of decomposing the goal to help the child complete the more difficult task, and the other is to use the red star to improve the quality of the child's homework.
If parents find that their children are always not doing a good job of a task, we will first help the child analyze the reasons. If the goal is too big or too difficult, we have to help the child break down the goal, break down the big goal into small goals one by one, like climbing stairs, and take the child to complete it in small steps.
There is a little friend in the book called Haunting, who is very inattentive and has a lot of mistakes in writing homework every time. So Dad helped him think of a way to no longer let him write all his homework in one go, but to write each subject separately. You can play for half an hour after writing chinese homework, half an hour after writing your math homework, and the same is true for writing English homework. After breaking down the big and long tasks, it seems that writing homework is not so difficult, so I become more focused and do not love to make mistakes as before.
In addition to helping children analyze difficult problems, they also need to help children find ways to improve. This week we can also add rewards for the quality of mission completion on the Red Star. The higher the quality of the task, the more red stars can be obtained, which is easier to operate.
I will tell you an example, and I will understand, or take the homework, which is the most concerned problem of our parents. Let's see how to use the Red Star to help your child improve the quality of their homework. We should pay attention to cultivating the good habit of actively checking after writing homework, and try not to let the child directly check it as soon as he finishes writing. If the child finishes writing the homework, he has checked it very carefully before giving it to us for inspection, and the homework is all right, the child can get a reward of six red stars.
If we see an error during the inspection, after the child checks it again, the homework can be corrected and the child can still get four red stars. If we still have errors in the second check, when the child can correct all of them, the child can get two red stars. If we check three times and there are mistakes, we must point it out, the child can find his own problem, then at this time the child can only get a red star, you see if it is very easy to understand, the book calls this method 6421 law.
In the process of use, parents can flexibly modify according to the actual situation. In short, the most important thing for us parents to do in the third week is to remind the child to pay attention to the quality of the task, and then constantly find ways to guide the child to improve, including helping the child to break down the goal.
After adding rewards for the quality of mission completion on the Red Star, we are ready for the fourth week of training. After the first three weeks of training, the child's efforts have actually begun to bear fruit.
At the end of the first week, the child initially establishes the concept of time.
In the second week, the child increases the speed of doing things, and can complete them quickly and well.
In the third week, he improved the accuracy of his work and could complete the task quickly and well.
By the fourth week, our goal is to help children be more efficient, so that children can do more things in the same amount of time.
In this step, we'll learn how to use the one-third rule to readjust the schedule, and we'll also introduce the last tool needed for time management training— the Black Star Table.
First of all, when the child is able to complete some of the previous tasks with high quality, we can rearrange the schedule and add some tasks appropriately. Of course, the premise is to communicate well with the child, so that the child does not reject this matter. For example, we can tell our children that because of your fantastic performance, you have reached the fourth level in the game of saving time, and now you have to increase the difficulty of the game a little, but the corresponding rewards will also become better.
When rearranging tasks on the schedule, we have to follow the rule of one-third, which means that one-third of the tasks are simple, one-third of the tasks are medium difficult, and one-third of the tasks are more difficult. In this way, the child will not find it particularly difficult when executing.
If you cause too much frustration to your child, they will soon refuse to train. In this process, we parents also have to observe carefully, if the child has not completed a task for several consecutive days, it means that the difficulty is a bit high, we have to adjust the schedule in time, after the adjustment, the red star table must also make corresponding adjustments.
For example, children can get one to three red stars to complete simple tasks, three to five red stars for medium-difficult tasks, and five to ten red stars for complex tasks. The purpose of adjusting schedules and red stars is to help children set goals and encourage them to gradually accomplish more things in the same amount of time, which is a gradual process and parents must not be in a hurry.
Towards the end of the fourth week, we can also work with our children to develop a black star, which is used in conjunction with the red star. The red star table encourages good behavior and helps children develop self-confidence, and the black star table is to remind children to reduce bad behavior and let them know how to take responsibility.
We parents need to inform our children in advance which behaviors are wrong, and we should be consistent with our children, starting from the next thirty days of time management training, if this is still the case, we will get a corresponding number of black stars, and when exchanging gifts, we will offset the same number of red stars. When using the black star, we parents must pay special attention to grasping the scale, not too strict. At the same time, we must also keep in mind the principle that double standards must not be used when evaluating children's behavior. What is a double standard? That is to say, the child's good behavior is very demanding, but the child's bad behavior is particularly sensitive, so that we will ignore the child's progress, thereby weakening the child's inner growth motivation.
In the author's usual consultation, he often encounters many parents who say that my child is always wandering when he is writing homework, and he has to remind him again and again that his attention should be concentrated. The author will ask the parent, how long is the child's process of writing? Parents usually answer ten minutes, twenty minutes and so on. You see the child has been focused for such a long time, but the parents completely ignore his good behavior, and they are caught and criticized by the parents as soon as they are distracted, which is because many parents have double standards, they are more likely to see the child's bad behavior, and turn a blind eye to their efforts.
Doing so will not only make the child feel stressed, but we ourselves will also be very prone to emotional loss of control and tantrums at the child. Not only in the whole process of training, but also in ordinary life, we must always keep this principle in mind. We must take good care of children who are already working hard to improve.
By the end of the fourth week, the thirty-day children's time management training program has completed a whole cycle, in order to help children consolidate their habits, it is recommended that parents can accompany their children to carry out several more cycles of training until the child can master the ability of time management on his own.
Finally, I would like to say that the above methods can be used not only on children, but also on your own. For adult time management, I hope you can understand a little, in fact, the so-called time management, the essence is to let us do a good job of target management, only if we are clear about our goals, we have the motivation to do a good job of time management, that is, when this internal drive exists, we will have this external behavior.