Who Is Watching The Kids

With both parents working in many homes today, a good question to ask is who is watching the kids? The problem comes when both parents need to work to pay the monthly bills. This can create a void in monitoring the children. Day care is an option, and some families have the ability to solicit the help of Grandparents to assist with taking care of the kids. In an ideal world, only one parent's income satisfies the financial necessities allowing the other parent to be with the kids. Even when both parents work it is possible to have a parent or adult in the home a lot of the time. This requires a lot of planning and coordination of schedules by everyone in the family.

Family Planning Meeting

Most children and especially teen's have busy schedules also. A good way to coordinate everyone's schedules is to have a weekly family planning meeting. Pick a day of the week when everyone can be together, Sunday's work for a lot of families. Everyone comes together with their scheduled events for the week. It may sound like a business meeting, it actually is, a family business meeting. Like anything, there will be conflicts that come up. By planning well in advance conflicts can also be resolved before they become a crisis to someone. This meeting will require people to compromise, and give a little. It is important to see that everyone gives a little, not the same family member every time.

Plan And Schedule

A white board can be an effective way to coordinate everyone's busy schedules. Some families prefer to use an old fashioned calender. Once all of the week's events are planned everyone can get a copy of the schedule. In the meeting it is important to discuss what the activity is. Where the activity will be held, and who will be involved. If a younger child has an activity, it will usually mean another older family member will be involved. If a parent is unable to take a younger family member somewhere, an older family member may be enlisted to drive the younger child where they need to go. It is a good idea when calendering events, to make a rough draft of the entire month ahead. This can help family members start thinking about ways to overcome conflicts prior to their occurrence.

Back Up Plan

A good idea while planning is to have an emergency back up plan. This can be as simple as a neighborhood friend or a Grandparent on call to help out as needed. Emergency may be a little too strong of a word, contingency plan may better describe what is needed here. The contingency plan would be used when something is cancelled the last minute. For example lets say a younger member of the family had a rehearsal for a dance concert, and it was cancelled a few hours short of the scheduled time. If the child was to be dropped by another member of the family a small problem can turn into a large problem rather quickly. If there is always a contingency plan in place, problems like this can be averted.