Teach Your Child That Every Task Has a Beginning, a Middle, and an End.
If I’m trying to help my six-year-old daughter Maggie become a more organized thinker, I feel like my instructions come too late. “Board game chips are all over the place, ” I tell her when I spot the scene a few hours after she escaped and moved on to three different activities. As someone who currently has bookmarks in about seven different novels, I may not be the best teacher on how to finish what you started. But I want to set my child on a different path: being organized reduces stress, boosts confidence, and gives people more time to do what they love (even if my daughter likes to point fingers in fluffy goo right now).
Dr. Damon Korb, a pediatrician, dealing with issues of development, the author of the book ” Education organized by the Child” , he writes that “the organized children do not appear suddenly – they are growing.” In his book, which was recently published by the American Academy of Pediatrics, he explains that learning should begin in infancy with a set routine. As kids get older, these routines will help them anticipate their next move, less and less prompting from mom or dad. One way to help parents solidify a routine, Korb says , is to tell kids that every task has a beginning, middle, and end . He gives an example: a child takes out a toy, plays with it, and then puts the toy away. “Disorganized thinkers may not recognize the ordering of tasks and are likely to need consistent reinforcement,” he writes.
Children already understand the concept of the beginning, middle and end of their stories. When I read Maggie at night, we often end up with a dramatic “Tee-ee-ee, end!” and then close the book, completing both the tale and the long day. Completing each task should feel the same. If your child wants a snack, you can ask, “What is the beginning, middle and end?” Your child may say that they will take a package of cheese out of the refrigerator (start), eat it (middle), and then discard the wrapper (end). Help them storyboard the process and follow through. It’s about constant reinforcement.
As they grow up, they will have several tasks to complete, and that’s okay too. If they have developed a solid understanding that everything has a beginning, a middle and an end, they can better understand what they can and cannot handle and set boundaries accordingly.
There are many things in my house now that are stuck in the middle or even at the beginning. In Maggie’s room, I see a handful of unfinished lanyard keychains and a list of movies we wanted to watch together this summer but didn’t get to. Recognizing the ending early on would help us close the book on these tasks, giving us more mental space to move on to the next story.