How to Organize the Free Time of Your Kids

A family of two working parents and a four-year-old decided to empower the kid to own his free time, education, and entertainment.

The current reality in the world is scary – most of us are working from home, people are getting sick all over the world. There is a lot of uncertainty. In situations like these (i.e. crisis), the best thing you could do is to concentrate on the short-term. Obviously, making long-term plans in times of uncertainty is hard.

My spouse and I are also working from home since March. Our 4-year-old kid is also at home with us. He has a lot of free time during the day, because the education system is, like often, slow to react and adapt to the new environment. After all, do you know that the original idea of the summer vacation for the kids is so that they can help their family with the harvest? Talking about adapting to new times …

Anyway, we decided to give our son’s routine in his own hands and to empower him to define his agenda for the day. We designed a game where we control the rules (i.e. guardrails like for example “max 2 hours of tablet per day”, “family has meals together”, etc.) But we largely let him decide how to self-organize his free time.

In this article, I am describing the way we did this.

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Care More About Less

Caring is our greatest trait, but modern life exploits it with news, gossip, problems, and clever product placement. This article teaches you how to care more about less, by reviewing and evaluating the important parts of your life where you want to spend your Care tokens.

Humans are caring animals. Most of you will stop and take care of a person who has fallen, or a bird that is trapped, or a puppy that is lost. Care has turned humans from groups of animals into societies. It has given us the power to unite (and separate), to achieve great things (and suffer huge failures). The modern life exploits this trait of ours, to force us into brand-loyalty, consumerism. This also causes more stress in our lives and generally makes us unhappy.

The answer, however, is not only to care less, it is to care more … about less. Review the things in your life you care about and rank and evaluate them. Imagine that you only have 6 care tokens a day. Do you want to spend them on Prince X and Princess M’s wedding news? On the turmoil in Country Z? Or on your family and kids?

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