The Minute Bank — Helping My Toddler Understand the Importance of Time
The Minute Bank — Helping My Toddler Understand the Importance of Time

An alternative reward system

Photo by Jelleke Vanooteghem on Unsplash

My almost-three-year-old son never wants to take a bath. Surprise, surprise. All he wants to do is play with his cars and I’m pretty sure he would roll his Hot Wheels around the living room until he fell asleep on top of them.

When it’s time to stop playing and take his bath, I usually say something like, “You can play for one more minute while I run the bath.” Lately, he has begun to use my saying against me. I will admit that it’s pretty cute to hear him say, “Mama I play cars one more minute.” At a 33 months old, he has no idea what one minute is, but he understood that “one more minute” allowed him to play for just a little while longer.

The problem with this was that after I would say this, my “one minute” would turn into anywhere between two and five as I tried to do things around the house while my son was occupied. He also didn’t really understand that one minute was a finite amount of time, so he would insist when I returned that I had promised him one minute (even though it had inevitably been more than two). So, I decided to set a timer.

First, I added the song Splish Splash by Bobby Darin to my phone and made it the alarm sound for the timer on my phone. When my son asked to play for one more minute, I set my phone, showed him the timer and left it near him so he could watch it count down. At the end of the one minute when it played the song, he began to understand that it was time to go to the bath. And, after about three evenings, he stopped playing when the timer went off and walked to the bath himself.

So, I decided to begin to offer up extra minutes before bathtime as a reward for good behavior. When my son helped me pick up his toys, I told him he would get one extra minute before bath. I would then reiterate it when it was bath time. “It’s bath time, buddy, but you get two minutes to play today instead of one because you helped clean up your toys.” It worked!

My son was significantly more likely to help out around the house if I offered up extra time to play before bed. And, my new “minute bank” helped me to do away with rewards like candy (which I was worried would set him up for an unhealthy relationship with food) and new toys (which were beginning to break the bank).

The added bonus of our minute bank is that my son is beginning to understand and gain an appreciation for time. The importance of how we spend our time (our most important nonrenewable commodity) is something that I believe is to important to convey to young people. Our minutes are important and should be treated as such.

Not only is my son helping out more around the house, he’s also learning gratitude for the time he has to play with his cars.
['Michelle Loucadoux']
['Parenting', 'Parenting Toddlers', 'Parenting Advice', 'Home', 'Family']