Bolster Your Family’s Mental Health With Routines

1. Bolster Your Family’s Mental Health With Routines Bolster Your Family’s Mental Health With Routines •CATEGORIES: Activities, Routines •By Laura Wilson In support of National Mental Health Awareness Month, this May we are exploring simple strategies that can help children and families build lifelong skills for managing stress and fostering wellbeing. We thought we’d take a look, from a mental health perspective, at an area of particular focus in the KITS Program: the importance of routines and how to make them work for you. If there’s anything we’ve learned in the past year it’s that life is full of surprises and uncertainty. Predictable and reliable family routines help children know what to do and provide structure and comfort during times of instability. When my children were very small, I balked at the idea of setting up routines; feeding schedules, established bed times? Who needs them? And everything went along just fine for a while…until I began to recognize that we were struggling with the same things every day and sometimes multiple times a day. I was losing my patience and found myself saying the same things over and over. It became clear to me that my children simply didn’t know what was expected of them at different times of the day. Luckily for me I had been working for KITS for a number of years and I knew what I needed to do. It was time for a routine. We started with just one, a bedtime routine, and now we have a routine for nearly everything. Routines have many benefits for our mental health. Routines help children gain a sense of mastery over their lives and their activities, which makes them feel good about themselves and fosters a positive self-image This sense of satisfaction carries over to the parents when we experience the fruit of our efforts to set our children up for success while

2. paving the way for easier interactions for all. Routines also help build constructive and positive habits (like, brushing teeth, reading before bed, schoolwork). Children who master routines gain self-regulation skills and self-reliance. It’s not surprising that my family is thriving on routines. Routines make life predictable and help children feel safe. Once they learn a routine, they will be more cooperative which is a huge plus for the whole family. Setting up solid routines takes a lot of effort at the beginning, but the reward is great. Sometimes we have to make changes and try different things until we find the right “fit”. Here are some KITS tips for establishing routines. Start with ONE routine. To get started, choose one simple routine that will make your days flow more smoothly. We started with the bedtime routine because it had the added benefit of paving the way for smoother mornings as well as providing time for parent self-care after the children settled in for the evening. Maybe you’ve already got a solid bedtime routine, but you’d like to help your children learn to participate in clean- up after meals, or get in the habit of putting away their toys or activities after they’ve used them. Read full article at: https://kidsintransitiontoschool.org/bolster-your-familys-mental-health- with-routines/