Finishing Summer Strong

Schedules, and why your family is a government

Our family wanted to keep up a schedule throughout the summer, with chores and help around the house clearly laid out in a chart, and Mom checking off tasks. This set clear expectations of what needed to be done to help the family, and more importantly, what was the baseline before the Nintendo switch came out, or we went to the pool in the afternoon.

With two, maybe three, and if you’re really lucky, four weeks left until schools starts, now is a good time to reflect on how our children fared with our program during the summer, and how we can get back into good habits before schools starts back.

These were simple tasks and easy wins to start off the day, like making beds and brushing teeth. We included a little bit of summer reading, piano for the boys who were taking lessons, picking up toys, and outside time. Our kids embraced it, mainly for the positive consequences associated with completing tasks, like going to the pool or playing half an hour of video games. But when our oldest went to sleep-away camp at the end of June, like a bike chain falling off the gears, our family chore chart stopped.

My son had unintentionally been the aide de camp for my wife, gently encouraging and sometimes strongly pushing for his siblings to complete their jobs so he could play Mario cart or Zelda for half an hour.

The whole project leads to an interesting observation in accidental delegation, and the importance of aligning incentives to get the desired results. Even with only a few people managing any project, such as this summer improvement program, programs can easily stop or not continue at the same rate.

One part that left was the outward pressure to keep up with a plan. Talking about this summer schedule, in an attempt to encourage you to start one, will also help me continue it in our family. I’ll have an outside attention on the problem, which will help me to keep up with encouraging our children to follow through.

Katie’s job was harder this summer because she lost her helper, and that pressure spread out to the rest of the family’s schedule. In a similar way, our responsibilities as citizens have gotten harder because Congress has stopped doing its job, putting pressure on other institutions like the presidency and the courts. People like to call our government a fragile democracy, but this summer schedule slow down actually highlights one reason our republic is so resilient. Since as much as we direct all our attention to the President, the House and Senate Leadership, and the Supreme Court, we have lots of outside attention on what all these actors do every day. We can take heart also that we have opportunities to replace our leadership when they’re not doing their job.

I hope the idea of a summer schedule finds a place in the last vestiges of summer, and is something you’ll consider next year. I know we have better ideas for keeping it in place for more than a month next year.

Photo by Raphaël Biscaldi on Unsplash