Time Management Skills for Kids: Simple Strategies to Help Your Kids Win at Any Situation

Effective time management requires the right techniques.

The Purpose of This Book

The purpose of this book is to provide a guide for parents on how to raise an independent, self-assured, and organized child. Doing so will boost your child’s independence, ease frustration, and promote confidence. The information is intended to help parents understand the struggles of their disorganized child, thereby minimizing parental frustration, and subsequent misunderstanding, through understanding and support.

This book gives an overview of early brain development as it relates to organization and provides appropriate age-based milestones for organizational skills. The neurodevelopmental functions that contribute to organization are described. You will be shown how dysfunctions (breakdowns or lacks) in these neurodevelopmental systems can interfere with a child’s everyday activities. Most important, the book provides practical solutions for parents and teachers to help children develop their organizational abilities.

New parents of young children can use this book to immunize their child against future organizational struggles.

• Parents who are already strongly affected by their child’s disorganization will be empowered to create an individualized treatment plan that consists of strategies for improving their child’s organizational skills.
• Finally, teachers can provide families with valuable tips and recommendations to address a student’s organizational deficits in the classroom. Remember, organized children are not born—they are raised.

Why This Book Is Important

A growing body of research from the fields of psychology, neuropsychology, and medicine describes how the brain supports organized thinking, and numerous books exist that provide parents and students with organizational strategies to assist with tasks at school and at home. But there have not been books that define the neurodevelopmental abilities that are critical for organization and then show parents how to develop their child’s organized thinking skills. This book shows parents how to teach their children to use organized thinking to show insight, plan ahead, and grasp the big picture.

Raising an Organized Child should empower you, as a parent, to support your emerging organized child at levels that are developmentally appropriate. This book spans infancy through the teen years so that you can refer back to this book as your child grows older. Use the milestones in this book to understand how hard to push your child, and use the interventions to support your child if he starts falling behind. You might even learn a little bit about how your organized brain works, and the realization that we all think differently and we all have strengths and weaknesses helps us understand that every child follows a unique and special path.

Organization of the Book

The content of the book is arranged to correspond with a child’s developmental level, so that parents can have a better understanding of their child’s organizational skills level, thereby enabling them to provide the right amount of support.

Each of the upcoming chapters of this book addresses specific interventions to support your child’s organizational progress. The interventions challenge children to exercise their executive functioning skills. My experience as a pediatrician and parent for more than 20 years has helped me understand that there are basic principles to follow when raising organized kids. This book puts the organizational expectations into a context of what is developmentally appropriate and explains the 5 Steps to Raising an Organized Child.

1. Be consistent.
2. Introduce order.
3. Give everything a place.
4. Practice forward-thinking: planning, estimating, and cr