When/Then Visual Timer
- Jacinta Stringer
- Aug 2
- 2 min read
ALevelUp is more than just a basketball training program. We are a community of people who want the best for our children. Coach Ben is always looking for new ways to improve relationships with parents, our athletes, and his children. This is why we have partnered up with Positive Parent Solutions, a parenting course designed by Amy McCready.
Once a month, we will be sharing parenting tips straight from the parenting course that we find are useful and actually work. This month we would like to start with the When and Then Visual Timer technique. This is to teach children the importance or prioritizing and not procrastinating the less fun tasks.
First, we are going to start by using terms such as When you are finished with your dinner Then you can play rather than saying terms like: If you finish your dinner, you can play. This is to bring attention to finishing the mandatory task in order to do the fun activity. When we use words like If you finish your dinner, it gives the option to not finish and turns play time into a reward. We want to avoid reward-based systems while trying to get our children to do simple everyday tasks.
Secondly, the visual timer. We want to choose an allotted amount of time for tasks such as: When you clean your room, Then you can have screentime. Then you can bring out the visual timer. Set the timer for say 30 minutes, the longer they spend cleaning their rooms/fighting to clean their rooms, the less screentime they get. If they can clean their rooms in 10 minutes, then there's 20 minutes left on the timer, and that’s how long they get with a tablet. The visual timer is great because digital timers just count down, and kids cannot physically see or understand the amount of time that has past or that is left. We have provided a link to the visual timer below.
The most important part of this technique is to make sure you are not using it as a reward based system. We need to make sure the things the kids get to do are normal things they get to do anyway. We are trying to build an understanding of not putting things off because there is something else that is more fun to do. But to do the task first and then enjoy the other more fun tasks afterwards.
You can find the Visual Timer here:
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