What Most Parents Don’t Understand About Teaching Students Time Management
I get asked by most of the parents I work with to teach their kids time management. “It’s their biggest issue,” parents tell me. “If they could just learn how to manage their time, I feel like they wouldn’t have so many problems.”
But what’s unclear to me is their definition of time management. I want to ask parents: “What do you expect exactly in order to finally say that your child is applying effective and proper time management?” However, before we even ask them what time management looks like as behavior, we should first ask why a student would want to manage their time in the first place.
Time Management Starts with What We Value
What parents don’t understand about time management is that before time management becomes a skill that effectively enable students to fulfill their responsibilities, time management first starts off as personal priorities and boundaries. A student who prioritizes (i.e., “cares more about”) having fun and enjoying their time with leisure activities will make time more for playing video games or scrolling through instagram instead of dedicating their time towards solving 60 calculus problems or trying to comprehend the economic impact of the Silk Road on Asia.
Teaching time management techniques like diligently maintaining a to-do list, constantly updating and reviewing your calendar, and scheduling time in your day and week to improve at a skill or complete homework assigned by a tutor do not matter if a student doesn’t feel it’s necessary to achieve their goals.
And if a student’s primary goal in life is to just have as much fun as possible rather than work hard and embrace challenges to pursue an academically rigorous career, then they’re never going to read one book per week even if they write it on their to-do list or schedule it as an event that repeats daily on their calendar.
If parents want me to teach their child “time management” so their child works harder in school and finally achieves amazing academic excellence, I wouldn’t start by teaching them time management techniques or tools. I would start by trying to teach them the value of an academic education. I would try to teach students why pursuing scientific knowledge might benefit them more if they want a stable career in the sciences than trying to practice crowd control in multiplayer online battle area (MOBA) video games like League of Legends or Dota 2.
Most students know doing well in school is important, but they don’t care about learning, especially if the process is difficult. There are many students who care more about what is immediately fun and easy to achieve rather than what overcoming what is intellectually challenging.
Here are some questions I have to parents who want me to teach their children time management techniques:
- What values do you try to teach your child?
- How often do you try to teach them those values?
- Each time you try to teach your child those values, how long do you try to teach them?
- How do you try to teach them those values? Do you try by telling them that it is important, or asking them why it’s important?
- Do you create conditions where not valuing what you’re trying to teach them to value leads to undesirable consequences they want to prevent from happening again?
- Do you establish boundaries and enforce limits?
It Can’t Just Be My Job
I work with these parents’ children for approximately one hour per week. But parents live with their children and have entire evenings with them (if they choose to) potentially every single day of the week.
It’s my job to try and teach not just better techniques and skills, but values that help prepare students well for their academic and professional futures. I know that. But if I’m the only one doing that job, a student will only potentially learn those lessons for a little more than one hour per week.
Learning doesn’t have to only happen at school. Learning can happen at home too.
Learning isn’t just about knowledge or skills. Learning can also be about values and morals.
So before we try to teach students how to manage their time, we should be asking what students feel is worth their time and why. Because if we figure that out, then we might understand why students “waste” their time the way they do. And once we figure that out, we might be able to reconfigure how they choose to invest their time.
