Using a Schedule as a Parenting Tool
Schedules can also help us teach important lessons to our children
As we enter this last month of summer, we thought we’d write some articles about ways to help our children (and ourselves 🙂) get ready for the new school year!
One day when he was in seventh grade, Johnny completely forgot to bring his Spanish textbook home and do his Spanish homework. To prevent that from happening again, he started keeping a to do list on a small pad of paper. That was the start of his adventures in using a schedule to help him manage his tasks and appointments.
We started asking our children to keep a schedule at around the same time in their lives (sixth or seventh grade). At the beginning of the week, we ask our children to take out their schedules (each page of which shows hourly blocks for each day in a week) and fill-in the family events on that schedule for the week. Then, after those times are blocked out, we ask them to put in the tasks and activities that they have to do. This includes working on school work as well as play dates and other for-fun activities.
While there are many fine commercial scheduling products, both in paper form and electronic form, we created spreadsheets with blocks for events that we print-out and that our kids place in their schedule binders. Our kids don’t have smartphones or personal laptops, so it didn’t make sense for them to use a calendar application for scheduling. Here are the spreadsheets in Excel form, if you’re interested in seeing our set-up or if you’d like to print your own copies for your own children. We’ve put both documents into the public domain.
The first version has even(-ish) margins all around. The second version has a larger top margin than bottom margin, to give room for the holes for placing in a three-ring binder. Both versions are designed to be printed out in landscape mode.
Schedules are, of course, very helpful tools for managing time. The schedule shows when you’re busy and when you’re not. It helps you avoid double-booking. It helps you allocate enough time to accomplish the tasks you have to do. These are in and of themselves important skills for our children to learn.
When we work with our children on their schedules, however, we have an amazing opportunity to help our children move forward on fulfilling the vision for their growth. An earlier article described the importance of defining a vision for our children’s development and provided a template for creating such a vision statement. When working with your child on their schedule, we can keep that vision in mind and purposely include tasks and events to help fulfill that vision.
For instance, say you want your child to grow to be able to live independently. Does their schedule reflect activities that will help achieve that goal? Are the chores you are asking your child to complete ones that will enable that to happen? This upcoming year, we are planning on having our oldest child cook the entire family dinner one evening a week. That goes into his schedule, along with whatever blocks of time he’ll need for preparation.
Or, let’s say that you want your child to become a kinder person. Are there events, tasks, or expectations that can be added to his/her schedule that will help facilitate growth in kindness, in building this up as a habit? You may want to schedule in time during the day where your child has to play with a younger sibling who might otherwise feel left out. Or, you can ask your child to schedule-in doing a certain number of acts of kindness each day. The Boy Scouts long ago made this a motto: “Do a good turn daily.”
Of course, the maturing of a child is not something we can “schedule.” We cannot define a list of tasks and obligations that we impose on our children and expect a specific finished product when they’re 18 years old. Still, schedules do have a role in helping us share with our children what they are aiming for and what are reasonable steps to help them get there. Schedules are a tool for us have a continuing dialogue with our children about what is really important for their lives and how to develop a life that is abundant and rich.
In addition to using schedules to help our children manage their time and move forward on fulfilling our goals for their growth, we can use a schedule to teach additional lessons. These include:
Time is precious: No matter who we are or what resources we have, we all have exactly 24 hours a day. An hour spent on one task cannot be spent on another. We can remind them of these truths and encourage them to think of time as a gift you’re given and that you in turn give to yourself and others.
Life often involves tradeoffs: Related to the preciousness of time, we can teach our children that usually, if you want to add something to your schedule, but you don’t have the room, you can’t (or shouldn’t) add the task unless you are willing and able to make the choices to open up the time. Through their schedule, our children can see that many times life involves tradeoffs. It’s been said that while we want everything quickly, cheaply, and of high quality, we usually only get to pick two out of the three. The schedule can show our children when and how this is the case.
(Re-)calibrate expectations: Children often have unrealistic expectations about many things: How long it will take to complete a task, what resources they need to accomplish a goal, how granular subtasks need to be, etc. We can ask whether the expectations their schedules reveal need to be altered in some way.
Visualize how balanced your life is: By showing you, in one glance, how your time is spent over the course of a week, your schedule gives you a pretty good idea of how balanced your life is (this is especially the case if the activity categories are color-coded in the schedule). Is there time for work and play? For working on physical, emotional, and spiritual health? For family, friends, and your community? Help your children to see whether their schedules are overweighted in one area or the other. Overweighting isn’t necessarily bad; sometimes, we need to focus on one area of our lives more than others. But, it’s usually better to enter into that focus deliberately rather than accidentally.
You’re responsible for your time: Last, but not least, as our children are putting together their schedules, we are teaching them that they are ultimately the ones responsible for how they use their time—not their parents, friends, or anyone else. True, for younger children, there will be less scheduling independence than for older children, but the same lesson can be taught.
While parents probably don’t need to talk about these additional lessons every time they work with their children on putting together a schedule for the week, we do think it’s helpful to keep them in mind and to judiciously share them with our children.
What other ideas do you have on how to use a schedule to help your child grow? Please include them in the comments below!
Authors: Johnny and Karen Lin. Updated September 1, 2025 to change Wholesome Learning advertisement and response button.
