5 Ways to Simplify Family Life
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Today’s families are burdened with too much to do in too little time, plus extra stress from tech and society. Here are my top 5 tips for simplifying life and regaining some peace!
I know I’m not alone in the realization that my kids are growing up in a vastly different world than I did. Streaming TV services have created all-day-long binge-watching for the youngest of kids that only existed in my childhood as occasional TV marathons.
Computers, smartphones, and tablets put the screens in their faces nearly every waking minute, and playtime no longer means hours of exploring outside. There are sports practices and games, extracurricular classes, and clubs filling calendars and exhausting both kids and parents.
In all the fast-paced demands, there are still some ways we can take a step back and simplify our family life. Here’s how!
1. Keep a Family Calendar Posted
If you don’t already have one, a posted family calendar is a must! Even if you have a digital calendar on your phone that you live by, it is so helpful to have an analog version on the fridge or wall in a central location that everyone can look at and add to.
Once kids can read, they should be looking at the calendar to see what is going on that day and what’s coming up that week…instead of asking you ten times a day! It also benefits your spouse or other people in your home to have the visual reference. You can color code each family member’s activities if that’s helpful too.
2. Establish a Daily (or Weekly) Rhythm
Few of us do the exact same thing every day, but that doesn’t mean you can’t set up a predictable rhythm that everyone in the family can live by. Alarms should go off at the same time each morning (with a few exceptions for when extra sleep is needed). Breakfast, chores, school, meal prep, and bedtime should follow a pattern each day, even if the time frame varies a little for those extra appointments, errands, and activities.
For us, a morning rhythm looks like: alarm goes off, get up, get dressed, make your bed, eat breakfast, feed the pets, sit down for school. A bedtime rhythm looks like: TV goes off, jammies go on, brush and floss teeth, read a book, get in bed, lights out.
These predictable patterns of what we expect kids to do each day help to establish a sense of safety, and also good life skillls.
3. Streamline the Meal Plan
I’m going to challenge you to get radical for a moment. If you struggle with getting meals on the table, it’s time to pull back and go basic. Write up a one-week meal plan. What’s for breakfast, lunch, and dinner for one week.
Then, repeat that meal plan for as many weeks as you need to, until you feel up to making a second week’s plan. From there you could add a third and fourth week, but if you want to really keep things simple, I would stick with a one or two-week rotation. Our breakfast and lunch plan stays the same each week and our dinners have minor fluctuations.
For instance, weekly breakfasts include waffles, toast/yogurt, cheerios/berries, hashbrowns, pancakes, and tater tots all on a regular rotation basis. For dinners we have dino nugget Mondays, Mac and Cheese Tuesdays, hot dog Wednesdays, french fries Thursdays, pasta Fridays, and taco Saturdays. Of course, we do mix things up here and there, but that’s the basic rotation for the kids during this season of life.
4. Limit the Toys
Most kids own far more toys than they need, but sometimes parting with the abundance is a process. In the meantime, the best thing you can do is set up a limited area for toys to be out, whether it’s a playroom or in the child’s room, have a few containers or bins for the current toys, and box up the rest for storage.
You can then do two things–a toy rotation, where you alternate the toys that are out on a weekly or monthly basis, or, you can keep them in longer-term storage to time-test whether those extra toys are actually loved and used or not. A helpful rule to put into place can be that if your child asks for a toy that is packed away by name, you can get it for them and they can swap out a current toy on the shelf for storage in its place.
Children are often overwhelmed by the mess of too many choices and usually play a lot better and for longer periods of time when they have less toys surrounding them.
5. Utilize Parent Control Timers
If screen time is out of control in your home, there are wonderful tools to simplify instantly. You can use parent controls and wi-fi controls to put your desired limits on their use.
For instance, we have a Fire TV and Amazon eero wifi extenders. The Eero app lets me easily set up times to pause internet access to the TV. Every night the TV goes black at 7:30pm. The kids know that when that happens it’s time to get ready for bed. This immediately cut down on whining and nagging.
Likewise, the Google Family Link App allows me to set up specifically what times and for how long my kid’s devices are on for. Computers, tablets, and phones can all be controlled through the app with the click of a button. Again, this has dramatically decreased the drama and begging for screen time because there is an established rule that devices can be used between 3-5pm in the afternoon, after chores and schoolwork are completed.
