Welcome to Boldschoolers! Today, I’d like to talk about habits. As school begins to wind down you might be counting the days until summer freedom or you might be planning to carry on as usual and keep on learning. Some families take a more formal break and some simply continue with their lifestyle of learning. Regardless of where you fall on that continuum, you might want to begin or maintain some habits throughout the year. Today, I’d like to talk about habits and why they are important to optimal learning.
While willpower wanes and motivation can be fickle, habits are strong and true. We can rely on habits when life gets a little crazy. I love the practice of intention. It’s a powerful directional approach to our lives and magic happens with clear intention, but what I’ve noticed is that intention doesn’t always get me into my workout or keep me eating clean. Similarly, many of us start the school year off bright-eyed and excited for all the incredible learning experiences that lie ahead and then…inevitably at some point in the school year…it’s not looking as shiny.
Becoming
The remedy? You might start by focusing on who you want your child to become. Who does your child want to become? What characteristics and values are important? When you open the door to your child’s education, it’s not just about the subjects your child will learn. One of the most important things is who your child will become along the way. Attribute development, optimism, socio-emotional skills, communication skills, confidence, compassion, empathy and an open, caring heart are beautiful gifts to the world. A child who can advocate for herself, stand up for what’s right and seek to change what’s not, is vital.
Thinking about becoming is so important because it gets us closer to what we ultimately want for our kids. Who do you want your child to be? What strengths and characteristics do you want for your child, both academically and in other areas of development? What kinds of behaviors does that child have? Once we can identify the behaviors that a child needs to have to be that vision, it’s a lot easier to move towards the habits required to get there. If you want your child to be a skilled communicator, for example, then we can look at the skillset of a good communicator and make sure our child has opportunities to not only learn, but practice those communication skills in different settings with different people each day. If our child wants to become a reader, are we utilizing experts to teach the skills of great readers and then establishing a daily practice of reading material at the appropriate challenge/skill level? I like to think of habits as another use for kaizen. Remember, kaizen is that idea of small, incremental improvement, bite-sized chunks of progress and it might be the smallest tweaks or adjustments that compound to make a huge difference over time. Sometimes we don’t think small things make a difference, but when that small thing happens day after day, month after month, year after year, possibility becomes infinite. Start with identity, build the habits to support that and the results flow freely from there.
Each of the behaviors that make up your child’s day cast a vote for who your child becomes. Is your child becoming the person he or she wants to become? If your child repeats particular behaviors again and again, pretty soon she will believe that that’s who she is. So, if she plays video games each day, she’s a gamer or if he participates in creative writing time each week or day, he’s a writer. It doesn’t take long for our behaviors to influence our identity. When we (and our children) focus on who we want to become, we can then help build habits around systems to support that vision. Who does your child believe he is? What are the strengths and weaknesses that have formed her sense of self? What might you want to shift or support?
Systems
Some families feel like daily habits are rigid or too confining. What I’ve found is that daily habits give us freedom because those habits contribute to our lives by helping us evolve into our best selves. Not only that, but children typically thrive with some boundaries, a container to grow into, offering stability, as opposed to that unsettled feeling of free fall or floundering.
We might focus on our systems instead of our goals. Goals are about the results we have when it’s all said and done, but systems are about the processes we set in motion to get there. I think it’s important to have a vision, but more useful to put our focus on the processes to get there. The results will come naturally from the systems we put in place. Success comes from what we do day after day. And excellence is found along that continuum of just showing up. You don’t have to be consistently great, but you do need to be great at being consistent. As James Clear, author of Atomic Habits says, “You do not rise to the level of your goals. You fall to the level of your systems.”
We are the systems architects for our kids. Think back on your school year. Did you and your child feel harried or relaxed? Were you pleased with the rhythm of your day? Is your child’s learning trajectory in the direction you desire? Are your children becoming the people you imagine? Was there a frequent experience of harmony or was there conflict? What do you wish you had more of? Less of? Let’s spend some time thinking about our systems and what we might want to get started this summer that might then help us flow into the next school year with grace and ease.
Researchers have noted that about 43% of what we do each day comes from our habits (Gervais, 2021). I’ve found that the more of my life I automate, the easier it is to reach my goals. That’s why I put on my workout clothes in the morning and don’t take them off until I work out. That’s why I do most of my writing in the early hours of the day when I’m fresh and it’s why I keep the same intermittent fasting schedule day after day. I’ve found that when things become just the way it is, things get done…and the hard stuff isn’t quite as painful. Of course, I mess it up all the time, but I think habits are a great way to help our kids become successful with the autonomy we want to give them while helping to form the identity they desire. When we internalize our habits, they then become who we are. Powerful stuff.
As James Clear (2020) says, for habits to stick they need to be obvious, attractive, easy and satisfying. Repeat behaviors enough times and you have a habit. When a desired behavior is obvious, your child knows exactly what to do, when and how to do it. It’s crystal clear and there’s a plan. Your child might not wake up each morning ready to jump into the day’s learning. That’s one place where habits can be very useful. Kids often don’t know what to do or when or how to do it. When the action is clear and it’s just what we do the hesitation is eliminated. When you think about the habits you want to incorporate, be clear on what, where, when and how they will happen, which brings us into the environment.
We understand the importance of environment when it comes to learning, but optimizing the environment helps our kids with self-regulation and self-control, as well. Our brains are constantly looking for patterns and those patterns are picked up as cues in our environment. For example, if you would like to decrease your child’s time spent gaming, think about moving the gaming console out of sight to a hard-to-reach area which can decrease the magnetic pull towards gaming, whereas rotating a bookshelf of good literature might be a good idea to encourage your child to pick up a book to peruse.
Nooks
You might design particular areas of your house, or nooks as I like to call them, tied to particular learning. Maybe you set up a corner of the garage for project work or an area in the living room with a beanbag chair and stuffies for quiet activities. Or maybe you dedicate a section of the dining room table to book work or a favorite bedroom chair for reading aloud. Nooks prime spaces for productivity. Our brains pay attention to where learning happens (i.e. physical location) often tying emotions to those places. The objects around us interact with learning and can invite it or dissuade it. If your child has a positive experience cooking in the kitchen with you, consider returning to that area to complete a science experiment, for example. Similarly, some parents find it useful to have a nook for reading, other areas for math, etc. and simply moving to those areas of the room can ignite past learning and memory. Think, also, about the objects in each learning space. What might inspire concentration or creativity? What might distract your child’s focus? Create environmental cues using areas of the room that have brought on engaged learning previously. Some families have a special scarf worn for writing, a unique hat for creative work, or a small, squeezy ball for reflection time, for example. You might consider linking positive self-talk messaging, music, or breathing exercises. Routines and habits interact with the environment to help a child learn and express skills. Remember, you don’t have to be consistently great, but you do need to be great at being consistent. Once a child shows mastery, vary learning locations to build mental flexibility. Nooks can signal the brain that an activity is coming, which lessens any friction your child might be feeling. Think about making the good stuff easier and the not-so-good stuff a lot harder.
Friction
When my middle son was young, we had a really difficult time getting out of the house because it took him forever to get dressed. He struggled to get items of clothing out of the appropriate drawers and onto his body. After what seemed like endless struggle, I found a hanging clothes organizer with vertical large open shelves labeled with each day of the week. After I did the wash each week, I simply gathered a set of socks, underwear, shirt and pants and put the entire set onto the shelf for a day of the week. My son then just had to reach into the pocket, pull it all out from a single place and get dressed. The result? Much less friction and no more problems leaving on time. Many kids struggle with the organizational skills to transition successfully from activity to activity and so we notice that it often all breaks down in the wiggly spaces in between. Consider how you might reduce the friction to enable smooth transitions. For many kids, having a place for everything is helpful because it’s a lot harder to see through the chaos to find that missing shoe or the favorite stuffie that we can’t leave the house without. Take a moment to think about those things you want to encourage in your child and how you can make them super easy to accomplish. Maybe you’ll put the violin in the practice area with the page of music next to it for easy access and visibility or maybe you’ll place travel brochures and a book of Greek history and myths on the table a few months before a family trip abroad. Make desirable habits easy to do. Lay out the clothes the night before, visibly place the toothbrush and paste on the counter, keep desks and chairs clear of clutter, have supplies organized and available.
Now, on the flip side take those behaviors that you would like to see a lot less of and think about how you can make them a lot harder. Where putting needed supplies and materials in easy-access bins might eliminate child frustration, taking the batteries out of the television remote and placing it in another room might make TV time just too much of a hassle.
Linking
Just as my son used the days-of-the-week clothes organizer to get dressed each day, your child can use other environmental cues to form new habits. You might try linking a new habit alongside of one that your child already has. For example, perhaps your child brushes his teeth after washing his face before bed. If your child has a consistent morning or bedtime routine, you can slide a new habit in right alongside the one your child already has. Maybe you would like to start the day with some gentle stretches or a mindfulness practice, so you decide to slide the practice in immediately following teeth brushing. Or maybe you want a time for mental math each day, so you link that practice immediately following putting on pajamas at night. In these examples, we paired a new habit with a time of day or a particular location. In my own life, I have a TRX hanging on my bathroom door. Every time I walk by the door, I am compelled to do a few reps of exercise. Cues can be used to signal a habit into place. You might try pairing an action that you want to do with one that you need to do. Maybe your child might enjoy friend time after completing the daily goals she set for herself or maybe your son will work on that tricky math problem for ten minutes before taking a break to build his model ship in the garage.
You might also consider joining your child in new habit formation or asking if other families want to join in the fun. if your child has company along the way, it’s a lot more likely that your child will be more enthusiastic, as well.
Lessen the Load
We’ve talked previously about the feeling of competence as a basic human need. Kids want to grow and learn and make progress each day. They want to feel capable and skilled. Learning is attractive when kids feel they are rockin it. Kaizen and the challenge/skill balance are important tools to create that win and sometimes too many choices can be overwhelming for kids. Sometimes we help our kids by taking away the many choices and leaving just a few. Limiting choices can be really helpful when dealing with those non-interesting part of life. For my middle boy, he couldn’t care less what he wore each day, so eliminating the burden of choice was a blessing for him. Think about those areas of your child’s life where there’s struggle. Can you limit any of the choices to ease the struggle?
In learning and in life, kids often have no idea which habits matter and which don’t. We get to serve as guides and experts adjusting the systems behind the scenes to best support their development and growth. I’ve also found it helpful to create contingency plans for when it all goes awry. If the learning activity doesn’t happen for one reason or another, have a backup plan for getting back on track without judgement. New starts give us a clean slate to make positive changes. The summer and the beginning of a school year are great times to form new habits. Many homeschoolers don’t radically change the daily rhythm during traditional school breaks and I think there’s great momentum in that choice because the habits that we stick to become our lifestyle and once something is lifestyle, those characteristics become an identity.
I’d love to hear from you. What’s one characteristic you would like for your child and what habit might you begin to get there?
