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Key points
- Habits are deeply learned behaviors we do without thinking.
- Rewarding small successes builds good habits that accumulate over time.
- The key to building habits is reward. Pay attention to small successes and slowly increase the difficulty over time.
Habits: The Good and the Bad
When I was in labor with my eldest, I said "thank you" to the midwife every time she handed me a cool towel or offered a sip of water.
Afterward, my support person laughed at me. Who says "thank you" in transition? Well, me, I guess because it was a habit learned in childhood–completely automatic and done without thought.
That's the essence of habits–they are learned behaviors so deeply ingrained that they are done without a thought in response to stimuli. Although we often focus on how hard it is to change bad habits (doom scrolling social media, apologizing for things we haven't done wrong), establishing good habits is just as important–and can help us conquer bad ones.
Building good habits for kids is particularly important, as those learned young and practiced over a long period of time become very well ingrained.
Make a Bed and Clean a Drawer
One habit I did not develop in childhood was scrupulous housekeeping. I'm neat, particularly in my workspaces, and, like many people sensitive to their environments, really value lack of clutter and visual calm. However, I'm always impressed by homes where you can randomly open a closet and see neatly organized storage and dust-free corners. Things got worse when I was juggling a toddler and a full-time (plus) job from home with 10 hours a week of childcare.
So my son and I built a new habit: we'd tackle one small job a day. So Tuesday, we might clean the silverware drawer. Just that. Dump the drawer. Wipe the tray. Clean the unspeakable grit from the corners. Sort the knives, forks, and spoons. Voila! One spotless spot in the kitchen. Time? Maybe 10 minutes.
The next day, we might clean out the refrigerator's veggie drawer—just that. Start. Finish. Celebrate.
My son learned to do the same thing. Toddler toys are great. Unlike those of older kids, they tend to come in sets: stuffed animals, Legos, books, and trucks. We were big into bins, so we might spend one day cleaning under the bed, another day pulling anything that wasn't a lego from the lego bin.
Spend the third day dusting a bookshelf, straightening a pajama drawer, or finding all the shoes. Again three-ten minute tasks we could get done and feel good about. Remember behaviorism 101: habits stick when they're rewarded. Short, easy, and satisfying = reward. Long, tedious, and annoying = punishment.
Notice two things. First, there are two habits we were developing here. One habit was tidying. Once you're used to straightening things that can easily be straightened, it becomes second nature. The second is systematically doing small tasks. Rather than saying, "I'm going to clean all the kitchen cupboards (a big job), the habit is, "what small thing will I do today?" There's rarely a good day to tear apart the kitchen. I can usually find ten minutes to organize the shelf with my plates.
Second, many small successes lead to things just getting better. If you do one extra thing every day, after a month, you start looking for something to do that you haven't done before, and things get easier over time.
If you build good habits into your day, you are starting to build small islands of happiness in your life. Another habit we added to our days was an outing. Not, please notice, an outing (big deal, lots of planning, money). But we'd get out and do something. Walk to the park. Go grocery shopping. Take a bus to the library. Have coffee with a friend. Sit on the front stoop and blow bubbles. It didn't matter what it was. The habit was that you visited the world outside the apartment.
Log Success
As I've written before, I use a loose organizing system to keep my chaotic life within the bounds of control. I draw heavily on David Allen's Getting Things Done system and Ryder Carroll's Bullet Journal (BUJO) method. One thing I really like about the traditional BUJO method is the habit log. It's just like the star charts your kindergarten teacher probably used, and it works the same way:
- List the habits you're currently working on.
- Reward your success by checking off what you did.
- Remind yourself what you want to do tomorrow.
For kids (and for you!), keep it short and simple. The idea is to reward small steps, not set yourself up to fail. So broad categories like 'read,' 'touch base with a friend,' 'do something fun,' or 'tidy' make it easy to succeed–which makes it easy to keep doing them.
Do not list specific, ambitious things you probably aren't going to do that make you feel bad. So I read most days–but not always 10 pages. For kids, maybe it's brushing teeth and hair. Clean one thing. Clothes in the hamper. Doing that daily makes it more likely they will eventually decide to straighten their underwear drawer, wash behind their ears, bring that hamper down and do the laundry, or schlep those dirty dishes to the dishwasher.
- Keep your list short. Start with three to five goals
- Vary the difficulty. I have a few things I am almost certain to do (read, make my bed, play my banjo). I have a few things I am working on that I do more often than not. And I will often have one task that's my next big goal. That way, I always succeed at something and remind myself where I want to go.
- Drop tasks that aren't working right now. For example, I would like to go exercise more. For several months I put that on my list. It didn't happen. Why? Because it wasn't really important enough for me to do right then. So I just dropped it.
A year later, I was ready, it went back on, and I did it—the same thing with your kids. First, get them to bring their dirty dishes into the kitchen reliably. Then work to get them sweeping and dusting.
Use Good Habits to Replace Bad
Because habits are over-learned behaviors we do without thinking, breaking bad ones is tough. The good news is that it's just as hard to break good ones! One of the most successful ways of breaking a bad habit is to substitute new, incompatible behavior for the one you're trying to eliminate.
For example, putting dirty clothes in the hamper is incompatible with kicking them under the bed. Going out and doing something–anything–outside is incompatible with spending the entire day slumped on the couch, staring at your phone.
Once you have built a new habit, you immediately start to miss it when you don't complete it. For example, when my kids were young, and I was an overwhelmed junior professor, I completely got out of the habit of reading for fun–something that was the foundation of my childhood.
I reintroduced and rebuilt that habit. Now, I associate sitting on the couch looking for something to do with the habit of reaching for a book and starting to read. (See my recent piece on teaching kids to be "leisure smart.") That habit is starting to substitute for my old habit of reaching for my phone and scrolling on social media.
Keep It Going!
Our habits make us who we are. Polite or rude. Conscientious or chronically disappointing. Happy with the world we have built for ourselves or living in constant low-grade annoyance.
Helping your child slowly build habits (and the set of behaviors that will form the basis for their personality) is a gift that can last a lifetime. It's also a habit of growth and happy self-improvement–celebrating small successes–that form the basis for feelings of self-efficacy, positive self-esteem, and happiness.
