Holy moly! So you got through the initial outbreak of the Pandemic. Now you’re working your way through the unstructured summer months. And it’s looking like the fall won’t be offering much relief, with most schools reopening on a part-time/flex basis, if at all. One way to make the job of full-time parenting/entertaining/educating more manageable is to add a little structure to your days.
Every school & camp day is broken down into periods (Math, Language Arts, Recess; kickball, lunch, arts and crafts). The length of these periods varies based on the age of each child and their equivalent attention span, but the general structure is always the same. Rather than reinvent the wheel, you too can break the day into age-appropriate “periods” and schedule out the days accordingly. For example, here is a general framework you could use:
Once you have a general structure in place, you can think of the week like a grid and all you have to do is fill in the details: what is the morning, afternoon, and evening activity each day of the week?
For the remainder of the summer:
Consider taking some of the pressure off yourself by asking the kids to pick their own activities for the week. Alternatively, try sitting down with the kids to come up with a small menu of activities (6 - 12) that you can cycle through when making their weekly schedules. If need be, don’t be afraid to resort to the internet for fresh ideas.
Filling out the schedule is something that should be done in advance — say, every Sunday night in preparation for the week ahead. You don’t want to arrive at Wednesday morning asking yourself, “what are the kids going to be doing this afternoon?” That’s when the anxiety sets in and the whole system comes crumbling down.
The structure should be such that it takes pressure off your plate rather than adding to it. Therefore, you should make it only as detailed as is helpful to you. Preplanning lunches and dinners for the week may make your trip to the grocery store a breeze, or you may find such rigidity stifling and overwhelming. Do whatever feels right to you.
Though the structure is designed to create order and help you manage the week, it’s important to remain flexible. When Tuesday afternoon “paint time” rolls around and Sally just isn’t interested, it’s totally fine to swap it with Thursday morning “mud pies in the garden.” And if you or the kids are feeling overwhelmed and planned out, it’s okay to take a break from the schedule and have a day off to just lounge around or do your own things. It’s totally fine to make “free time” the afternoon activity.
Finally, if this year has taught us anything, it’s that plans don’t always work out. So it’s a good idea to come up with a few “rainy day plans” as well. For younger kids it could be building a fort in the living room or betting on which raindrop will make it to the bottom of the window first. Older kids may want this to be a video game block. They may even want this to be a “sunny day plan.” That’s okay. At least when you schedule it, screen time is limited to an hour or two as opposed to the whole day.
And, once kids return to school in the fall:
Simply replace the Morning and Afternoon Activity blocks with school work or other educational activities. You may need to add more “periods” into the day to more accurately resemble the structure of a traditional school day. You also may not be able to be quite as flexible about changing the Morning and Afternoon activity blocks — school work is non-negotiable! But, at the end of the day, kids crave structure. Establishing a “normal” routine will help both you and your kids to feel more grounded and in control.
While this structure won’t entirely remove the stress of the Pandemic or the added pressure to make sure your kids have fun this summer or stay on track with their education this fall, it will ease the burden of having to reinvent each day as it comes. You may even find it a helpful tool for scheduling a little time for fun and self-care into your own schedule. After the past six months you’ve had, there’s no doubt you could use it.