Training Habits without Losing Your Mind!

If you are expecting charts, stickers, timeouts, schedules, programs, organizational tips-- (which seem to work best for the organized)--please find another blog. You will not see any of that here!

Back in February, a friend started a local Charlotte Mason study group. This is the first time I have ever gotten to read her books and swap stories with skin friends. Last week we covered habit training, which we can easily look like dog training with velvet gloves if we get all legalistic. When I applied the ideas our group shared to guide kids in our church's after-school program in relational ways, class went more smoothly. Another friend who teaches a college class on disabilities set up a video call with me, so her students could talk to a family living what they are learning. They asked my opinion of behaviorism and received the flip side of raising autistic children: through relationships, not rules! Last week, our church Bible study focused on living Christ's principles (by staying connected to Him Colossians 2:19-23) and to avoid becoming enslaved by worldly principles ("Do not handle! Do not taste! Do not touch!"). Then, a cyber friend asked about helping her teenager keep a cleaner room in a Mason way. God tossed all of these circumstance into my life in the past two days, so I got the hint and decided to blog it!

Relationship Development Intervention (RDI) (our favorite autism therapy) and Charlotte Mason (our favorite method of education) have similar ways of guiding children in their thinking. When our thoughts change, changed behavior will follow. Both begin with parents: the way we think affects the way we parent. We need to start with the head and heart for change to occur: the head and heart of the family changing first, which then flows into the head and heart of the child. Mason recommended parents cultivating three habits when training their children: tact, watchfulness, and persistence. These three habits dovetail very nicely with RDI.

Tact - Tact means saying, "Dave, can you come here for a minute?" instead of "DAVID JOSEPH GLASER!!" Tone of voice alone can mean the difference between a strong-willed child showing up with an open hand or closed fists. It means using a hopeful and expectant look rather than a frown and glaring eyes. It is giving a few brief words and having a conversation, not a dreary monologue, to help your child understand why a habit is important to you and will benefit them. Half the battle is won when you and your child agree about why a habit is needed. Tact means knowing your child well enough to find the right idea to inspire him to reform his ways.

Watchfulness - Watchfulness means observing your child and figuring out the best way to approach a new habit based on her nature. It means being aware of triggers for poor behavior and preventing them. It means knowing what contrary habit might work best in helping her succeed. Watchfulness means setting up a situation (timing, environment, control, brainstorming) conducive to forming the habit and keeping it in the long term. It means altering the plan if the outcome isn't quite what you envisioned. Watchfulness means never allowing friction creating an ever-widening gulf within your family.

Persistence - Persistence means being vigilant until the habit sticks and not relaxing, undoing weeks of effort. It means staying hopeful, not cranky, when progress is slow. It means realizing that building one habit at a time in the marathon of childhood gets you farther than short bursts of programs that rob you of your energy and joy. Persistence means knowing that habits are not going to change overnight and require patience and consistency. Persistence does not mean helicopter parenting.

Before describing habit training, keep in mind these points:

• Habit training is hard and requires vigilance. Focus on one habit at a time or you may lose your mind.
• Try indirect cues. Commands rob children of the chance to think for themselves. Use hopeful and expectant looks. Speak with a calm and friendly voice. Simply stating their name may be enough to check their behavior.
• Avoid a "running fire of Do and Don't" (page 134). Consistent habit training will prevent that in the long run.
• Allow natural consequences to dictate the reward: washing the dishes means Mom has time to bake brownies, controlling a nasty temper lets the whole family enjoy life, paying attention during lessons leaves more time for play!
• Let divine grace rule your interactions. "But the little fellow has really not much power to recollect, and the mother will have to adopt various little devices to remind him... she never lets the matter be a cause of friction between herself and the child, taking the line of his friendly ally to help him against that bad memory of his" (page 123).

If you are habit training all the live-long day, something needs to change. Mason's analogy provides a sense of proportion once you have gotten into the habit of habit training:

Let me say that the education of habit is successful in so far as it enables the mother to let her children alone, not teasing them with perpetual commands and directions... but letting them go their own way and grow, having first secured that they will go the right way, and grow to fruitful purpose. The gardener, it is true, 'digs about and dungs,' prunes and trains, his peach tree; but that occupies a small fraction of the tree's life: all the rest of the time the sweet airs and sunshine, the rains and dews, play about it and breathe upon it, get into its substance, and the result is––peaches. But let the gardener neglect his part, and the peaches will be no better than sloes (page 134).

So, how does it look in action? Mason provides several examples, the first of a little girl who wastes time lacing her boots (pages 120-121). Instead of going for the surface issue (lacing), she zeroes on the real problem: daydreaming. (In fact, if you have a dawdler on your hands, I suggest you read Inconstant Kitty while you're at it.) Mom gives her daughter a few words about how much more time she'll have to play if she can dress for outdoors in five minutes. She watches her without a word, with expectant, warm looks, and only a slight touch if the girl lapses into a reverie. The mother makes a point to join her for all those instances where the girl dawdles. As the child becomes reliable after a few weeks, mother fades out of the picture.

The next example is about shutting the door of a room (pages 122-123). Mother gives her son the request and explains why—for the comfort of others (living in a drafty, old house, I spent the winter training Pamela on this habit). She promises to remind him if he forgets, and she does with a pleasant voice for she knows crying out in exasperation will only encourage him to increase the distance between himself and the open door. She reminds him indirectly because he needs to think for himself: she glances at the door and says, "I said I should try to remind you." Each time, she varies her gentle cues to transfer responsibility for remembering to him.

How would I work on a messy room? First, I would plant the idea of why her room should be cleaner and then I would think of a contrary habit to replace the messy one. There are plenty of good reasons to clean a room: fire hazard, tripping over stuff, not being able to find stuff, relatives coming for a visit, etc. Whatever your reasoning, it needs to be brief and presented in a way that the teenager gets. Avoid the temptation to kill interest with a monologue. On the contrary habit, you might try brainstorming possibilities that have a relational twist to it that makes you an ally. Pick just one habit and work on that. When that becomes automatic, pick another habit. Here are some ideas:

• Every day, set the timer for ten minutes and the two of you clean up together. Have you ever seen the ten-second tidy on Big Comfy Couch? It can be silly, fun, fast, whatever. Turn on some upbeat music. Laugh at the disgusting things you find. Let the teenager pick the time of day: it needs to happen once a day before the deadline you set. Some kids are happier having some control.
• Let the teenager pick the tasks hated least. Let the kid who hates dusting vacuum the messy room and perhaps others while you dust. In real life, people bargain.
• Before watching TV, pour the stuff from one drawer into a clothes basket. Take it to the TV room and have a trash can nearby. In two weeks of watching television, the drawers will probably show improvement. Buy any organizer things and start consolidating the scattered stuff.
• Brainstorm something completely different than what I have here. With some kids, having an ally to bounce off ideas is half the battle. Having a say in the matter, bargaining, and feeling like everyone's opinion matters makes a difference. It needs to be a daily habit that is short and palatable. Over time, you'll see progress.

Sometimes, family dynamics make the situation worse. The parent who is frustrated about the mess needs to back off and assess progress in a month. It helps to reframe words that may be truthful but fan the flames. "Your room is complete disaster. WHY did YOU leave it that way?" will cause the strong-willed child to fire right back. Asking why for rhetorical reasons invites conflict. It may require experimentation until the least divisive words are found. Asking "Have you had a chance to do the ten-minute tidy?" with pleasant, relaxed nonverbals may be all that is necessary. If not, asking the parent with the stronger relationship to handle may be a better way.

How One CM Homeschooler Stays Organized

I am not one of those "school in a box" homeschoolers nor do we use workboxes. In the Barbie-pink crate are the books we are reading and the myriad of folders for each subject that hold graphic organizers, narrations, notes, math materials, printed out stories and poems, etc. I prefer pronged folders over three-ringed notebooks because paper doesn't tear out as easily. Since Pamela loves going through her old materials many years later, pocket-only folders do not work for us either.

Over the weekend, I type up the weekly plan in Excel and print it out. I also prepare graphic organizers, math manipulatives, etc. if time permits. Pamela, like her dear daddy, gets jazzed about marking off items as she goes and picks the order in which she does her work. She is quite the doodler, too.


Charlotte Mason considered a schedule one of the sound principles of a well-managed homeschool. Students need to know what they need to do and how long each lesson should last. On page 142 of Volume 1, she explained, "This idea of definite work to be finished in a given time is valuable to the child, not only as training him in habits of order, but in diligence; he learns that one time is not 'as good as another'; that there is no right time left for what is not done in its own time." To emphasize that point, I have a stopwatch to keep us from taking too long on a lesson.

Since things do not always go according to plan, on the weekend, I revise the list from the previous week to document what we actually accomplished. Then, I print out a clean copy and file it in a folder, pronged, of course.


You may look at our schedule and think we must spend every waking hour homeschooling! We do not.

Last week, we worked about four hours every day, doing the majority of the work in the morning. What we do is the antithesis of block schooling, which is all the rage in the schools in my town (four classes per semester, each class earning a year's worth of credit). We have very short lessons on wide and varied subjects, just as Charlotte Mason did at her schools. On page 286 of her third book, she stated that students aged elevenish to fifteenish spent 3 1/2 hours a day, using thirty-five books, to cover Bible lessons, recitations, English grammar, French, German, Latin, Italian (optional), English, French, and Ancient History (a la Plutarch's Lives), Singing (French, English, and German Songs), Writing, Dictation, Drill, Drawing in Brush and Charcoal, Natural History, Botany, Physiology, Geography, Arithmetic, Geometry, and Reading.

The secret to so many subjects is having short lessons. Notice that reading a poem only takes five minutes on my schedule. Most lessons are twenty minutes or less, even math because I have three twenty minute math lessons (Geometry, Algebra/Arithmetic, and Number Theory). Charlotted Mason recommended short lessons for reasons beyond having a wide and varied curriculum on page 142 of Volume 1,

• The sense that there is not much time for his sums or his reading, keeps the child's wits on the alert and helps to fix his attention.
• He has time to learn just so much of any one subject as it is good for him to take in at once.
• If the lessons be judiciously alternated––sums first, say, while the brain is quite fresh; then writing, or reading––some more or less mechanical exercise, by way of a rest.
• The program varying a little from day to day, but the same principle throughout––a 'thinking' lesson first, and a 'painstaking' lesson to follow,––the child gets through his morning lessons without any sign of weariness.

They had no homework!

Neither do we! If Pamela finishes everything up by Friday, she has no work on weekends and holidays. Charlotte Mason held classes on Saturday mornings, so our days last a bit longer. I find no need to dole out rewards or stickers because of one lovely, natural consequence: Pamela has more time to do what she enjoys doing, whether that be rocking on the porch rockers, using the computer, playing with her toys, making calendar lists, etc.

Whac-A-Mole

Last November, Pamela let go of her 18-month infatuation with the sacred hour right around the time we started working on uncertainty. Now, we are working on helping Pamela handle trigger words, which are also related to the uncertainty found in staying on one house, getting sick, etc. Our RDI consultant pointed out that Pamela's anxieties are like the Whac-A-Mole game: when Pamela discovers she can live one category of anxiety, another pops up. We suspect that she is testing out various areas of her life and we hope she will make the big milestone discovery: when you feel anxious, you can stop, watch and listen, think, reflect, change your thoughts, stay calm and neutral, realize you only know part of the story, and/or read the body language of people around you. The new anxiety revolves around whether or not Steve plans to make the 2.5-hour round trip to the office and, if so, what time he plans to leave. Steve and I have work to do on this over the weekend, and I will share how it goes next week.

I have not talked about Charlotte Mason in awhile, but what we are really doing is working on habits of the mind, one she did not cover. I find many of Charlotte's thoughts on habit training helpful:

But habit, to be the lever to lift the child, must work contrary to nature, or at any rate, independently of her.

Pamela's initial inclination is to overreact to uncertainty. What we are doing is building a lever she can use to lift herself out of the habit of melting down when uncertain!

How is the dilatory child to be cured? Time? She will know better as she grows older? Not a bit of it: "And the next, more dilatory" will be the story of her days, except for occasional spurts. Punishments? No; your dilatory person is a fatalist. 'What can't be cured must be endured,' he says, but he will endure without any effort to cure. Rewards? No; to him a reward is a punishment presented under another aspect: the possible reward he realises as actual; there it is, within his grasp, so to say; in foregoing the reward he is punished; and he bears the punishment. What remains to be tried when neither time, reward, nor punishment is effectual?

Like Charlotte, I prefer working on Pamela's thought life rather than an elaborate (and what I would find exhausting because of my inconsistency) system of rewards and punishments. Nor do I wish to endure her overreactions because they are as hard on her as they are on us!

That panacea of the educationist: 'One custom overcometh another.' This inveterate dawdling is a habit to be supplanted only by the contrary habit, and the mother must devote herself for a few weeks to this cure as steadily and untiringly as she would to the nursing of her child through measles.

Every day Steve has the opportunity to go to work, we have an opportunity to replace the habit of overreaction with new habits (the ones listed earlier). I will need to be very consistent in nursing her through this while Steve will need to work on avoiding QPCs and slowing down long enough to help her learn new habits.