The Importance of Routines and Tips for Enforcing Them with Children
The Pennsylvania Key’s newsletter, Bright Start, Bright Kids, Bright Future, recently noted that the beginning of a new school year provides a great opportunity for caregivers to help children get into routines.
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After the summer - a season that, for children, provides more freedom than usual - it is important to ensure that children are getting back into routines. Doing so can create a sense of the familiar and stability. Routines can help to promote healthy and social emotional development.
According to Bright Start, Bright Kids, Bright Future, routines can help children to:
Make sense of the world and learn how it is organized
Feel secure and safe when many things in their environment are constantly changing
Develop their ability to regulate their own emotions and behavior
Learn skills and internalize habits through repetition
Learn self-discipline and develop personal responsibility
Set internal body clocks through such actions as eating meals or going to bed at the same time every day
Have a sense of independence and autonomy when much of what happens is out of their control
Engage in fewer power struggles, arguments, or conflicts with caregivers
Develop confidence and self esteem as various tasks are mastered
Anticipate and look forward to what comes next
Have continuity, consistency, and predictability in their lives, which is important in a world that is unpredictable
Bright Start, Bright Kids, Bright Future also provided some tips on how to establish and enforce routines. Caregivers should create visual reminders or a picture schedule for a typical day. They should plan structured activity periods - for example, play a game right after a nap.
Caregivers should break routines into steps - such as ordering activities when getting ready for bed: bath, pajamas, brush teeth, story time, and singing. It is also helpful to prepare a child for transitions from one activity to the next - for example, tell them that in a certain amount of time the next activity will commence.
Developing regular routines for daily activities - meals, bed time, or quiet time, for example - is important. But caregivers should also be flexible and creative and try not to be rigid or unable to adjust to specific circumstances.
Other resources include a Creating Routines infographic; Visual Supports for Routines, Schedules, and Transitions; and School-Age Learning Environments: Schedules and Routines.