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15 Ways to Save Time with Kids

By Lucy H. Hedrick

A women I know gives each member of her family a supply of large safety pins. When anyone takes off a dirty pair of socks, they pin them together. The socks remain pinned through laundry, drying, and putting away until they're worn again. No need to sort and match!

Mount an outdoor thermometer outside your child's bedroom window and encourage him to read it every morning. This will help him decide, and take responsibility for, what outerwear he'll need that day.

Give your child her own wall calendar, mount it near where she does her homework, and help her write in not only important events and family birthdays but also her homework deadlines, book reports, science projects, and the like. Giving children the opportunity to look at a whole month and take the long view will help them plan ahead and avoid doing assignments at the last minute.

Avoid bunk beds and complicated bedspreads, dust ruffles, and pillow shams. Your child will be more willing to make a bed with a fitted bottom sheet, a comforter (with washable cover), and a pillow.

If you take time to plan, you can do almost all the preparation work for dinner ahead of time. Maryanne works full-time and has three school-aged children. She can give her kids more attention when she comes home in the evening by getting a jump start on dinner in the morning. She routinely cuts up salad, marinates meat, and cleans vegetables in the morning. Furthermore, she assigns her kids simple cooking chores to do after school, like putting potatoes, or a casserole, in the oven to bake, setting the table, or emptying the dishwasher.

Is doing homework with friends a good idea? Yes, if the assignment gets done. No, if the time required to complete it is overly long. Insist on a beginning and an end to a joint effort, ideally after other assignments are done.

Is there a more aggravating question on this earth than "What's for dinner?" To make deciding easier, Julie keeps a loose-leaf notebook where she chronicles her own version of "The 60-Minute Gourmet." Her pages are divided into menus for company, favorite recipes of her family, and a few pages for new recipes to try. To avoid too-frequent repetition or cries of "What? Fried chicken again?" she arranges the recipes in an order she can follow from one day to the next.

When you move to a new community, you have more to transfer than just your furnishings. Don't forget your children's medical, dental, and school records. You can aid in their forwarding by providing the school or medical office with a preaddressed, stamped envelope.

Before kids are old enough to understand the importance of regular teeth brushing, they tend to rush through the job. Buy them a three-minute egg timer and encourage them to keep brushing until all the sand has run out.

Does your family use portable combination locks? Write down in a safe place the combinations for your bicycle locks, your locker at the fitness center, the cabin of your boat, and so on. If you lose a combination, it's very time-consuming to write away for the number and to possibly lose the use of your equipment.

I heard about a mother who was so pressed for time that she put her son in the bathtub with a toy boat on which she placed a cheeseburger that he ate while she read to him. You won't be surprised to learn that the little boy soon dissolved into a tantrum! It's a fact: The more we rush our kids, the more difficult they become.

Car pooling works well if the other children in the group live close to you. If, on the other hand, you find yourself driving out of your way, are you really saving time? "Keep your driving distances short," advises Linda, a veteran driver. "It's awkward to release yourself from a car pool. Perhaps you and your child would be better served by some one-on-one time in the car."

When Ron and his family tried downhill skiing for the first time, no one knew what they were doing, everyone got cold and wet and was miserable. "Save time and limit fumbling," he now advises. "If you want to try something new with your kids, hook up with members of another family who have some experience.

Joan returned to full-time work when her twin boys entered kindergarten. How did she find the adjustment? "Very difficult, but I learned to lower my housekeeping standards and streamline my actions," she says. "We load the dishwasher once a day after supper; the breakfast dishes just soak in the sink. We make our beds or change the sheets before we get in them at night." Now that's what I call "letting go."

Tell your kids that if they spend 10 minutes a day looking for things they've misplaced, they waste more than 60 hours a year. Some parents confiscate what's left lying around and demand small fines to get it back. Others label buckets, baskets and boxes to make it easier to put things away. Whichever stand you take set a good example: Put your possessions back where they belong.

15 Ways to Save Time with Kids