How I Teach My Kids About Habits [Episode 266]

Recently, we talked about ten principles for creating a productive summer. Spoiler alert - a central part of a good summer rests on GOOD HABITS! So this week, I’m sharing how I teach my kids about habits.

We have these conversations in five-minute increments after we read scriptures at breakfast over the course of the week. It’s meant to be fun and silly while still teaching them important principles that we apply to their lives.

These concepts have changed my life as an adult, and if my kids can understand how their brains work and learn to work with them to create habits, then they are set up for success. 

Here are five things I teach my kids about habits:

1. There are a lot of things we need to do to take care of our bodies, minds, hearts, and spaces. 

2. It’s each of our responsibilities to take care of these things for ourselves.

3. Our brains are amazing! We can learn to do things automatically so we don’t think so much about it. That’s called a habit.

4. To make habits easy to do, you need to set things up to make it easy to do and decide when you are going to do it. This is called a trigger.

5. Just focus on creating one habit at a time.

We use this shared understanding in our family conversations to help us collaborate and solve problems together and figure out how to do the things we want to do more easily. 

In the video version of this week’s episode, you can see how I draw everything out on the whiteboard, or you can check out the workbook I created so you can easily walk through this with your kids.