ADVICE RATING |
 4.73 (Highly recommend) from 7 votes (183 Visits) |
Some people ask me how we run things in our home with five kids ages 0, 7, 10, 13, and 14. So I thought I would mention a few of our tricks and maybe these will be useful to someone else.
We begin our day around 
5:00am because our oldest leaves at 6:00am to attend early morning seminary and we like to start the day off together praying as a family. I think this is the #1 tip to give to anyone- start the day off together in a very positive way. I can’t think of a better way to do that than to kneel down, thank God for our blessings and ask God to watch over each of our children.
Keeping the older kids on task is a big challenge. They all take music lessons and have pretty heavy loads from school, and somehow we have to work in unstructured play time, family dinner, cleanup, and nighttime routines into the mix. The way my wife and I do it is to keep a chart made with Excel (see image). There is a grid for each child, the columns are days and the rows are tasks. This becomes the kid’s “todo” list for the day. And they check off the tasks as they complete them. The goal is to fill in all the blocks. For a time, we had a little trouble getting the kids to manage this on their own, so we instituted a “Self Manager Sundae” program, where at the end of each week, any child that has finished everything for at least six of the days will get a big giant sundae with lots of toppings. That’s been a great motivator and the kids enjoy it.
The week-day afternoons are structured like this: Downtime after school, reading, music practice, homework, play time, family dinner, cleanup, pajamas & hygiene, scripture reading, and bed time. If we stay on task, we usually get this done by 9pm.
On Saturdays, we do chores in the morning and have the rest of the afternoon for fun and activities. This is, of course, ideal. We get more relaxed on Saturdays and the kids often play around anyway and the chores don’t get done until the afternoon. 
Sunday is our Sabbath day and we make it a special day for our family that they look forward to. We sleep in, attend church, have a nice big lunch together, take really long naps, and then have a pleasant evening either reading together or visiting friends. As a rule, we don’t watch any TV on Sunday. It’s great!
We watch virtually no network or cable TV (we don’t even have cable). We have a carefully selected library of DVD’s that the kids can watch in their free time. We do have video game consoles and a couple of PC’s, which the kids enjoy, of course. The way we manage these things is to give the kids tokens in reward for good behavior. Each token is good for ½ hour of video games. We limit them to two tokens per day and no more than one movie’s worth of TV in a day. In practice, they don’t watch any TV during the week and play about ½ of video games a day.
Well, that’s the basics. I hope this is helpful information!
(April 25th) (
