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Time Management for Kids

Home » Tips » Time Management for Kids

Help your kids manage their time more effectively for their studies and play with these simple techniques!

By Mary Frederick

Spending time teaching time management for kids can be a rather large task.

Getting them to understand how important it is to stick to a schedule, and what it means to meet an established deadline can be challenging at best.

It’s important to work with your kids early on to help them understand what time management is and how it works.

If you work with them to establish guidelines and help them understand how elements like time constraints and multitasking work, they will carry these lessons with them throughout their life.

It’s good to start early on so that they can work towards comprehension and practice good time management skills. Here are some tips to make it work:

Make it Fun

If you make time management for kids a chore, or worse yet – making it dreaded, then your kids won’t embrace it.

As with many lessons you teach your children, the best way to teach them is with a little bit of fun incorporated. When they are young, make time management for kids and meeting deadlines a fun game.

They can work at perfecting time management, yet they are still utilizing these crucial skills.

Create a Chart

This is a fundamental lesson in time management for kids that can work quite well at getting things started.

Start early on by creating a chart of all the things your children have to do in a day or throughout a week. Include their homework, any chores, any family activities, and of course leave time for fun.

This is a great way to help them visualize all that they have to accomplish, and then they can work with you to determine how to get it all done.

Use a Timer

This won’t work for every activity, but it can help your kids to see how timelines work.

For example, if they have to complete their chores before they can go out and play with their friends, set a timer. They can quickly see how to budget their time because they will see the clock actually ticking.

This will help them to truly understand how much time certain activities take, and that will help with establishing necessary timelines for activities.

Develop a Schedule

This works well as your child gets a little older and has school, sports, extracurricular activities, homework, chores, and a social life.

Work with your child to create a schedule that details out where they have to be and when, it can even start based around a family calendar.

Write down all recurring events, and detail out all timelines associated with each of the scheduled activities. This can work quite well with the chart of responsibilities, as the two go hand in hand.

Work with Them on Prioritization

Assign a letter or a number to each of the tasks your child has to complete in a ranking type of order.

Help them to understand how priorities work, and then establish a system whereby they can see where homework is a top priority, while hanging out with friends is a lower priority that requires other work to be completed first.

This works well as they can physically see how a ranking or grading system works, and then they truly understand what a priority is and how it is attached to their list of activities.

Make Them Responsible

The older they get, the more responsibility you should give them.

Start off by working with them on creating a chart of responsibilities, a schedule, and priorities.

As time goes on, let them have input and make them responsible for marking off tasks and penciling in new ones.

This is fundamentally important so that they learn to be responsible for things, and will help to sharpen their time management skills.

Award Them for Their Efforts

As with any type of responsibility or activity, rewards can really help.

If they finish all of their tasks on time, work through an award system. If they finish all of their homework in a timely manner and get their chores done before deadline, offer them up an ice cream cone or treat them to lunch.

Rewards can help to offer incentive, and though they need not be elaborate they can really help to keep them engaged.

Teach Them to Adjust to Changes in the Schedule

Schedules are always subject to change, and that’s important to establish with your children.

They need to know that though there is an established schedule, there are always bound to be circumstances that change things.

Work with them on how to handle these changes and how to switch gears and adjust the plan in a pinch. This is an important part of time management for kids, and definitely a skill they can carry with them.

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