Back to the grind
The importance of routine for children is so often emphasized that it’s easy to forget. Until the routine is disrupted, of course, like with two weeks of Christmas holidays, when they sleep in too long, have variable bedtimes, eat far more sugar than usual, and spend an unhealthy amount of their time in front of one screen or another. That’s when the importance of routine becomes impossible to ignore.
In my house the signs begin with general crankiness, followed by irrational tantrums, and ending in tear-drenched defiance, and I’m only talking about the parents so far. All of which means that the transition from the holidays to our regular routine is not always easy, but we manage it in several ways.
First, despite what I may have implied earlier, we do try to keep as much of our routine as we can throughout the holidays. We want the kids to have fun and to enjoy the break in their responsibilities, but we also want to show that there need to be limits if we want to remain a healthy and functional family.
Second, we mark the holidays very clearly, and we go cold turkey from one to the other. It’s easy to let the holiday liberties begin a little early, and it’s even easier to let them go on long after the holidays are over, but there’s less pain in the long run if we just get back to our routine as quickly and as cleanly as possible. There’s no point in letting the sugar-addiction and the sleep-deprivation drag on any longer than necessary.
Last, we also try to be good models. Our kids are more likely to accept a return to their normal habits if they see their parents doing the same, so we try to be as firm with ourselves as we are with them. There will certainly be times when we can relax our routine as time goes on, but for the moment we’ll benefit more from some good sleep, healthy food, and ordered routine — all of us, parents included.
Luke Hill is a stay-at-home father of three boys, aged nine, seven, and three. He has fathered, fostered, adopted, or provided a temporary home for kids anywhere between birth and university. He has taught college courses, adoption seminars, camp groups, Sunday School classes, rugby teams, not to mention his own homeschooled kids.
