Routine charts

What a routine chart is actually for

Mostly it’s there to stop you saying the same seven sentences every morning.

Ours went up because I had noticed I was asking “have you brushed your teeth” at roughly the same point every day, and because a four year old genuinely cannot hold seven steps in her head at half past seven in the morning. The chart holds them instead. She looks at it, I say nothing, and we both get to the front door in a better mood.

Worth knowing before you print one: this does a different job from a reward chart. A reward chart is about persuading. This is about remembering, which is why it can stay on the wall long after a sticker chart would have outstayed its welcome.

The pictures are doing the work

Each row has a picture next to the words, which means a child who can’t read yet can still use the whole sheet on their own. That’s the bit that makes it worth putting up. Point at the row for the first few days rather than reading it aloud, and most children start pointing at it themselves surprisingly fast.

The words are there for whoever else is in the house. A grandparent doing a Saturday morning, a babysitter at bedtime, a partner who does the school run twice a week: they can all follow the same order without asking.

Keep the two sheets apart

Morning and bedtime are separate charts on purpose. Put the morning one where mornings happen, by the front door or in the bathroom, and the bedtime one on the bedroom door. A child standing in front of a chart that shows bedtime steps at seven in the morning has to filter out half of it, and filtering is the thing they can’t do yet.

Hang it at your child’s eye level, which is lower than feels right when you are the one holding the Blu Tack.

When it stops working

Usually because the order on the sheet is not the order in your house. If your child gets dressed before breakfast and the chart says otherwise, they will point that out for about three days and then ignore the whole thing.

Cross the row out and write over it. A chart with pen on it looks like a chart somebody uses. The one that stays pristine for a month is the one nobody has looked at since the day it went up.

You don’t have to tick anything

There are boxes for all seven days and a row of stars along the bottom, and plenty of families use neither. It works perfectly well as a list on a wall, with the ticking as an optional extra for the sort of child who enjoys that kind of thing.

If yours does, hand over the pen and let them get on with it.