My child is always procrastinating in his study. What should I do?
My child has no sense of time and doesn't keep his word (I made an appointment with him to "he should study after half an hour", but when the time came, he kept playing).
After I communicate well with him, he still refuses to mend his ways despite repeated criticisms. Next time he still procrastinates, what should I do?
Answers ( 2 )
I once read a great essay on "Creative Procrastination" but now it seems to have been buried by Google in favour of numerous opinions of how to stop procrastinating, which apparently has been declared universally evil. I'll try to remember what the article said....
IMNERHO, procrastination is a powerful instigator of creativity. Here's how you can use it to your advantage: when you are trying to avoid task A that you dread, think of a less important task B that you hate even more; then tell yourself that you will get to A as soon as B is finished. Voila! You can "get away with" doing A first! For instance, i hate writing grant applications, and I've been putting off mowing the lawn for a week or more. Today I promise to finish writing a grant application before I mow the lawn. Oh boy, that lawn really needs mowing, and it's sunny out this morning... the grant application can wait until it's raining.... Lawn gets mowed!
Instead of lecturing your boy about homework, try giving him a chore to do that he really hates, and tell him he has to finish it before he does his homework. As long as other distractions are eliminated, I bet he'll go after that homework first.
Of course, your results may vary....
Your child procrastinates, has no sense of time, and still doesn't start learning when the appointed time is up.
This is essentially a matter of time management.
As a parent, maybe you can help your child when he is very young.
But when he grows up, you don't understand a lot of his senior homework, you don't have time to do it, and you shouldn't do it for him.
So how can children put themselves on a right track so that they can learn, do things and grow up efficiently?
The most crucial point is time management.
From the beginning when they come into contact with the abstract concept of time, children are definitely not good at time management, so it is necessary for we parents to systematically cultivate our children's time management skills and habits with painstaking efforts and methods.
Below, I will start from two major aspects, one is to analyze the difficulties in cultivating children's time management ability,
The other is to give specific operational methods (which can enable parents to systematically cultivate their children's good time management habits within a certain period).
First of all, let's analyze why it is so difficult for children to do things on time and efficiently. "
1. The concept of time is abstract; children have no concept of time.
Time is an abstract thing, invisible and untouchable, which is difficult for children to understand.
From the perspective of cognitive development in developmental psychology, children do not gradually understand the concept of "day and night" until they are nearly 3 years old. At this time, they begin to know that "when it is dark, we have to sleep; we can only go out to play during the daytime."
Then after a period of time, after learning some basic mathematical knowledge, they began to know clocks, when and how many minutes, hours and minutes and other units of time.
But at this time, it is still difficult for children to understand "how long is 10 minutes or half an hour?"
This requires we parents to help our children visualize time-starting with a minute of understanding so that they can gradually understand the length of time.
The specific methods will be introduced later.
2. It is difficult for children to assess "the time it takes to do something correctly."
When the child slowly learns "how long is 10 minutes or half an hour", another problem arises: it is difficult for the child to accurately assess "how long it will take to do a specific thing."
The following situations are familiar to children of all ages:
They thought they could finish their math homework in half an hour, but they didn't finish it in an hour.
They should wash up and get ready to go to bed in 10 minutes, but they haven't gone to bed for half an hour.
They were supposed to finish their homework all weekend, but they couldn't finish it at the last minute on Sunday night.
"Task time assessment" is also a difficult problem for adults, but it is especially prominent for children with less self-control and experience.
3. Children can't make plans.
When the child accumulates experience and knows "the approximate time it takes to complete a set of exercises", a further challenge arises -- "as the child grows up, he has more and more things to deal with."
For example, in high school, the world of children will become much more complicated.
They have to learn all kinds of lessons and become more difficult; they have all kinds of exams; they also have all kinds of extracurricular activities.
When and what to do
if there are multiple conflicts in the same period, how to prioritize, and how to plan, these are not things that children can learn naturally.
They all need the help and training of some external methods.
4. Lack of effective incentive mechanism.
It is a child's nature to play; time management is essentially a planned limitation of "freely elapsed time".
Between "playing carefree all the time" and "learning with both difficulties and challenges", children will naturally choose to play.
From a psychological point of view, we hope that anyone who acts according to specific rules needs an appropriate incentive mechanism.
Most people like to play games, mainly because there is a well-designed incentive mechanism in the game, frequently and intensively give players immediate positive feedback.
After the child has overcome the above difficulties, recognizes the time, and makes a detailed time schedule, it is challenging to implement the plan. Without a rigid schedule of the incentive system, it is difficult for the child to adhere to it for a long time.
—
After analyzing the essential difficulties of developing time management skills above, I would like to give some specific operational suggestions from my experience of educating children:
1. Record the time.
You need to know "where's all my time gone?"
The first step in time management is to record the time spent for one day.
Only by mastering "where do I spend my time" can we make a reasonable plan.
Daniil Granin wrote a book:
Tell the story of entomologist Aleksandr Lyubishchev who made incredible achievements in his life through his original "time statistics".
The more people grow up, the more they feel the value of time, but no one can say clearly, "what have I done in every hour and minute in the past?" Lubichev recorded events and specific hours without any difference for 56 years, accurate to minutes, analyzed, summarized and made plans to the extent that he could accurately perceive time.
He simply used the extreme time management to make a significant contribution to the history of human entomology research!
The specific method is: parents spend a week record one by one: event, start time, end time, time, remarks…(every day from the child gets up in the morning to go to bed at night )
Sequence number | event | start time | end time | usage time | remarks
1 | get up and wash up | 6: 30-7:10 | 40 minutes | he lay in bed and dawdled.
2 | Breakfast, go out to school | 7 10-7:40 | 30 minutes | his action is fast and finished ahead of schedule.
...
...
8 | Mathematics homework | 1900-20:00 | 60 minutes | he was distracted and I urged him
Please keep a record for a week, analyze the time log, and discuss it with your child as appropriate.
Master the overall time cost, evaluate the time-consuming of a typical task, and find time-inefficient links.
2. Use the schedule and progress bar to let the child see the time and visualize the task.
With the time log as the basis, you can work with your child to make a "time schedule", including tasks, planned time, progress bar, actual time used, and saved time.
Sequence number | Task | scheduled time | Progress bar | actual time used | saved time.
1 | get up and wash up | 40 minutes | 30 minutes | + 10
2 | Breakfast, go to school | 30 minutes | 30 minutes | 0
...
...
8 | Math assignment | 40 minutes | 60 minutes-20
9 | Piano | 40 minutes.
10 | Autonomy time | 60 minutes
Here are a few key points:
To make a time schedule, be sure to discuss and do it together with your child, and take "the child thinks it is reasonable" as the final standard. If the child does not cooperate, you can add an appropriate reward mechanism.
Don't fill up the schedule, you add "self-determination time" and playtime according to your child's wishes.
"scheduled time" you can calculate the "average time used in the past" according to the time log, and gradually adjust it according to the "child's time management efficiency".
The design of the progress bar is critical here, especially for young children.
Because time is abstract, for your child to see it, you can write the to-do list on a large piece of paper, and then design a variety of interesting progress bars (for example, a grid every ten minutes, which can be filled with different colors. Children can paint the progress bar themselves when doing a task, which is not only interesting, but also allows them to perceive the concept of time more concretely. )
For young children, you don't have to make a "24-hour big schedule".
You can start by simplifying the three tasks you need to do every day, and make the process enjoyable with interesting progress bars (colored squares or circles of different sizes).
The key is to let the child "see" the time and task and develop a sense of achievement in completing the task.
This part is more like "We make our own to-do list at work", except that it is customized to suit the child's situation.
3. Encouragement and autonomy.
Our goal is to teach children time management, not to manage time for them.
Therefore, we should give our children autonomy.
Every step (recording the time, making the schedule, designing the rules of rewards and punishments, the exchange of prizes) should fully introduce the children's opinions, make them feel respected and equal, and give them time to decide on their own.
Only when the child thinks, "this is my own schedule," will he really take it seriously.
Finally, time management is not an easy skill to learn.
We adults sometimes fail to complete our task.
So we can't ask our children to do what they say (planned) the first time, and we have to forgive them for not being able to control some situation.
More encouragement, less punishment.
Cultivate children's good habits over a long period.
4. Summary.
Most of the time, we worry that "our children are disobedient and difficult to teach."
To a large extent, it is because "we ask our children with the consciousness and ability that adults already have." For a child, he doesn't even have an "abstract concept of time." How can parents ask him to manage his time well?
Therefore, it is crucial to find the core of the problem.