Many years ago, a friend encouraged me to jot down our “systems” – hope these are helpful to you!
Bedtime Rituals
Chores
Community
Dates
Quiet Time
Meals
Money
Sleeping
Taking Turns
Bedtime Rituals:
From birth until age 10 we had a bedtime ritual that we did pretty much every night with each of our kids. We read lots of parenting books early on, and many of them suggested that having consistent bedtime rituals helped kids feel secure / loved / safe, in addition to helping them sleep soundly and peacefully. Here’s what we did, starting about an hour before their appointed bedtimes (this was a hugely important part of our family life each day):
Paul bathed the under-6 crowd. This was great daddy bonding time, and he was famous for his use of a kitchen pitcher in providing a waterfall for hair washing. All our kids loved bath time, and the under-6 crowd all bathed together, which always made for lively adventures especially when someone who wasn’t quite yet potty trained forgot where they were 🙂 Paul helped them get into their jammies and brushed their teeth, prayed for them, kissed and hugged them then sent them to me for the next phase 🙂
(Older kids got a quick shower after the younger ones’ bath time.)
I read each child a book of their choice, sitting on my rocking chair with all the kids on my lap.
The younger kids would then take turns running across the room and jumping in my lap for as many repetitions as their age in years, before I rocked them individually and sang each one their three bedtime songs (“Jesus Loves Me”, the special song I wrote for them when they were tiny, “The Lord Bless You and Keep You”). I then prayed for them and hugged and kissed them profusely before tucking them into their bed. The older kids liked to extend the time with “questions?” when they saved up all their most difficult philosophical and scientific questions that have exceedingly long answers. Fun times!
Chores:
I’ll expand on this later, but we think it’s important to teach kids to do chores for several reasons:
* learn skills
* everyone needs to help out in the smooth running of any household
* earn some cash (we don’t give “pocket money” or “allowance” for free)
Here’s the system we used, for ages 3 to 12. Once the kids turned 13, they had more responsibilities (see Turning 13). We had the children do chores each day from Monday to Friday. Saturdays were reserved for group chores, like yard work, washing cars, etc. Sundays are a day of rest!
age 3: 3 chores per day, earn 3 cents per chore ($0.09 per day / $0.45 per week)
age 4: 4 chores per day, earn 4 cents per chore ($0.16 per day / $0.80 per week)
age 5: 5 chores per day, earn 5 cents per chore ($0.25 per day / $1.25 per week)
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age 12: 12 chores per day, earn 12 cents per chore ($1.44 per day / $7.20 per week)
When Peter was 12, Jonathan was 10, Michael was 9, Cascade was 7, Esther was 5, and Karis was 5 – in other words, I had to come up with 48 chores each day for the kids to tackle. There was some grumbling from time to time, but it was a pretty good system and a great way to keep our home in some semblance of order sometimes anyway! Housework is definitely not my forte, so having a system like this helped me get motivated to do the stuff I needed to do, too.
Every Friday afternoon we went to the bank and each child deposited their earnings (after taking out their tithe, 10%, for church). See Money for more on how we encouraged them to save as much as possible.
Community
Paul & I are strongly committed to living in community as much as possible. For us, what that looks like includes:
* open our home to others who need a place to live. In the 31 years we’ve been married, we’ve had dozens of other people live with us for a couple of months, a year or two, and one special friend, Walt, stayed for 5 years. It doesn’t just help “them” – it helps us to be more open-hearted, better parents, better friends, better people. It has helped each of our family members to become more outward-focused (“it’s not about me!”) and greatly lessens the temptation to act badly (something we all need help with).
* have people over in our home as much as possible. We host movie nights, small groups, parties, gatherings, prayer meetings, any excuse to have people over.
* pour into our local church. The body of Christ is primarily a family. We treat our church like our family and vice versa. It’s a beautiful thing to be known and loved.
* say yes to every invitation to our whole family whenever possible. We are especially excited about all of us being invited to weddings (hint, hint)!
* shop locally to support local businesses – these are our neighbors – we want to be good neighbors
Dates:
Paul and I made a commitment when we married to continue to date each other for as long as we both shall live. A date can be in-house or at a park, restaurant, movie theater. Just going for a walk together is a great date! The key is to spend time with one another and to let each other know that “you’re special!” So when our kids came along, we realized we could apply the same idea to our relationships with them. We didn’t want them growing up as “one of the crowd.” So, to help each relationship thrive (after all, with 8 people in the family, there are 28 pairs of relationships), we decided to date our kids. Here’s the system we used each week for many years:
* 1 evening was reserved for Paul & Karen to have a date (if we had a sitter, yippee, but if not, we had an in-house date after the younger kids went to bed – see the section on Sleeping).
* 1 evening was reserved for family night – we played games together, went to the park, went to Chuck E. Cheese’s, went on a walk, went to a restaurant . . . TIME together 🙂
* 1 evening was reserved for Paul to date one of the children – always a meal at a restaurant
* 1 evening was reserved for Karen to date one of the children – always a meal at a restaurant
Yes, we spent four evenings a week doing this – a big commitment. I strongly encourage young parents to resist the pull of culture to be so busy with activities that family life gets lost in the mix. Put God first, family second, and everything else will be just fine. It’s worth it!
Meals:
Paul and I were both blessed with parents who thought it was important to eat meals together each day. We grew up thinking of that as normal. So we decided to make it a priority to eat meals together as a family as often as possible. For many years, especially when our children were young, we ate 19 or 20 meals together each week (thanks to Paul’s job allowing him to work from home). We were shocked when we first heard the grim statistic that most families eat dinner together 3 or fewer times each week (Fewer families eat together).
Each meal begins with joining of hands and praying together. We started out with just Paul praying to give thanks before the meal, but we’ve morphed to giving everyone the opportunity to pray around the table. With little children, we didn’t do devotionals at the meal table, as we did them daily in school (see Bible). Now, before pray together prior to our evening meal, we take turns reading from a devotional. It’s a battle these days (now that our kids are older teens and adults) getting all the current residents of our home to sit down together for a meal, but most evenings we have at least 3 or 4!
For many years we concluded each dinner meal with a chapter or two from a book – family reading after meals is so delightful! It helped that I’m a fast eater and love to read aloud. We devoured many wonderful long books as a family, many of which have been imprinted on our hearts and minds forever. I’ll try and gather the titles here eventually . . .
The food itself is somewhat important, but you can see that the main thing is relationship. I do spend time planning meals so I’m not running to the grocery store more than once a week (less often when the kids were young – I even did the once-a-month cooking thing for awhile because of the stress of taking lots of little people to the grocery store). Nutrition is important, as is having a good balance of color and taste and texture. I don’t thresh my own wheat or anything, but a little bit of planning can go a long way to helping craft yummy, simple meals that everyone will enjoy. And it’s so easy with the internet at our fingertips these days. You can even do the “pantry raid” style of cooking where you look on the shelf and see what you have on hand, then look it up and find a meal you can make with those ingredients. I love that kind of challenge!
Money:
Money is a root of all kinds of evil, the Bible tells us, plus it’s the number one source of discord in marriages. Jesus talked more about money than most other topics. It’s important to know how to handle it rightly, and the earlier kids learn this, the better. The main principles with money are: giving, saving, spending. Our culture tends to say spending, spending, spending. So it’s counter-cultural to learn how to be generous and actually save some money instead of plunking it down on the next impulse purchase (which are ever-present). The first thing we taught our kids is that God owns it all! He trusts us with whatever we have, whether time, talents, or treasures, and our job is to be trustworthy in how we take care of the things He’s trusted us with. One really important way to say “I trust You” back to God is to give back to Him the first 10% of everything we earn. Paul and I have done this our entire marriage. I thank my parents for teaching me this when I was 7 years old. And we have found that God is ALWAYS faithful – we have never lacked for anything we needed. In fact, God has seen fit to bless us with more than we’ve needed, so we have even more to give away. What a joy it is to give! Our culture tends to make us think that the more we earn, the more we can spend. But there’s an even better way – the more we earn, the more we can give away.
In order to help our kids learn how to save, we opened a bank account for each of them when they were 2 years old, with a seed deposit of $20. Actually, Andrew, a good friend who lived with us for 2 years, donated his entire coin jar to Peter to help him start his account, so he probably got more than 20 bucks in his initial deposit. We took a trip to the bank every Friday afternoon after school was done for the week. Each of the children deposited their earnings, whether a few coins or birthday money or income from a job. The bank tellers loved it, as it is apparently a novelty to have regular young investors make personal deposits. Every year prior to age 13, Paul and I rewarded their savings efforts by giving them a bonus deposit of x% for their xth birthday (e.g. when they turned 3, we gave them 3% of their bank balance as a gift; when they turned 12, we gave them 12% of their bank balance as a gift, which we almost regretted when Jonathan had already amassed $2000 by then).
Quiet Time:
“Quiet Time” is a euphemism simply meaning “spending time with God.” The main thing is to be present in the present in the presence of God. Read a passage from the Bible, pray (two-way conversation involving speaking and listening), and be still and allow God to speak to you. Here are some online resources that I love:
Pray As You Go
Bible Hub
Bible Gateway
Sleeping:
Paul and I decided before our first child was even born that we wanted to continue to have a thriving marriage. That was our main reason for deciding on bedtimes for our kids. I get the impression that there’s a trend these days where the kids decide when they feel like going to bed. I imagine that’s a source of lots of grumpiness and the kids are probably as grumpy as their parents. There’s nothing like a good night’s sleep, every night, to let each person be their best possible self! We had few exceptions to these guidelines, because in addition to helping each one get a good sleep, everyone looked forward very much to reaching the next milestone (and enjoying the fact that younger sibs didn’t yet have the same privileges!) . . .
Sculley kids’ bedtime schedule:
from birth to 6 years: 7:30pm
6th birthday: 8:00pm
8th birthday: 8:30pm
10th birthday: 9:00pm
12th birthday: 9:30pm
13th birthday: no fixed bedtime, but they had to be in the room where they sleep by 10:00pm. Incidentally, we have a “no screens in the bedroom” rule – no TVs, no smartphones, no tablets, nothing electronic. Just old-fashioned reading of books, writing in journals, doing crunches / push-ups, trying on outfits . . . and hopefully sleeping!
Taking Turns:
We’re a bit geeky in our family. Considering that as of 2017, members of our family have completed 6 science degrees (4 Bachelor’s, 2 Master’s), 3 science degrees partially completed (2 Bachelor’s, 1 Ph.D.), with several more university / college degrees yet to be undertaken, we’re seriously geeky. So I came up with a formula for taking turns (as fairly as possible, even though life just isn’t always fair).
When the children were younger, this question was asked daily, many times a day, at our home: “Whose day is it?” Everything, and I mean everything, hinged on whose day it is. Who got to go first, who got to sit where, who got to choose a cup, spoon, movie, treat, game, gift for the birthday person to open, etc., etc., etc. Being a very mathematical family, we used a simple formula to determine this in a somewhat fair manner (and the children seemed to be satisfied with this). Firstly, we determined who was in the “running” (e.g. if a movie was being chosen, it could have been out of all 6 children; if a spoon was being chosen, maybe only Karis & Esther were in the running).
Let x = the number of children in the pool for taking turns.
Divide today’s day-of-the-month by x.
If the remainder is 1, it’s the oldest child’s turn first.
If the remainder is 2, it’s the 2nd oldest child’s turn first.
If the remainder is 3, it’s the 3rd oldest child’s turn first.
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.
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If the remainder is 0, it’s the youngest child’s turn first.
For example if all 6 children are in the running, and it’s the 26th of June, then we start by dividing 26 by 6. The answer is 4, but we’re not interested in that – we only want to know the remainder, which is 2. That means it’s Jonathan’s turn first, then Michael, Cascade, Karis, Esther, then looping back to Peter. Some of my offspring may conclude from this that most of the good stuff happened on days with certain remainders . . . but for all intents and purposes, this worked rather well in sorting out taking of turns, because, after all, it was the calendar’s fault if things didn’t go as one had hoped!
Once you have determined whose turn is first, the next one is simply the next youngest and then loop back to the oldest.
Pure mathematicians may take issue with this system not being perfect due to variations in the numbers of days divisible by each number during various months (not to mention leap years), but it’s close enough to “fair” and the kids enjoyed doing the calculations themselves! Empowering 🙂
We have a set of twins – this adds some extra mathematical fun, because neither twin understandably wanted to be thought of always as the older or younger. When they were very young, we used the simple formula of odd days were Karis’s and even days were Esther’s. As they got a little older, the calendar year came into play. We designated Esther as getting the “older” ranking in odd years; Karis earned that title in even years.
This whole system cut down these kind of squabbling arguments to a negligible amount. It’s harder to argue with a calendar 🙂
