Mommy and Daddy Study Behaviors of Procrastinating Child From a Safe Distance

As the most clock-oriented person in our household, Laurea often has a difficult time relating to the meandering flow of her roommates’ morning routines. Kina responds with frustration when Laurea tells her she can play for five more minutes before brushing her teeth, no matter how kindly her mother delivers the ultimatum. This often prompts Kina to simply start her dawdling anew, in an effort to reach whatever state of calm she was seeking in the first place—which just brings Laurea back to the timer, which restarts the whole process.

The other day, Laurea brought to me the notion of “clock time versus event time”, which seemed like a revelation to both of us in some ways but is actually a fairly well-documented differentiator of social structures.

In short, Laurea is on clock time—driven by schedules that are locked to a globally-agreed-upon and highly specific thing we invented and that Kina and I have never fully understood.

By contrast, Kina and I are on event time, which means that we’ll get around to doing the next thing when we’re done with the current thing, and we are driven by a general and relative sense of temperature around any two sequential events. If the next thing is getting hotter and the current thing is getting cooler, we’ll head over.

As you can imagine, this difference in perspectives, when left unquestioned, can lead to issues.

So the other night, when Kina was in her room playing with beads, having twice already rebuffed her mother’s insistence—over the course of ten minutes—that it was “time to brush her teeth”, Laurea turned to me for advice. What had I done in this situation to get Kina to move on? Having never been consulted as an expert in procrastination, I was honored to demonstrate.

I went to the bathroom, put toothpaste on Kina’s toothbrush, and knocked on her bedroom door.

“Okay if I get your toothbrush ready for when you’re done with that?” I asked.

“Okay,” she replied.

I returned to my room. Laurea seemed curious. Two minutes passed. I walked over to Kina’s room again.

“Okay, toothbrush is ready,” I told her.

“Got it. I’m finished. Let’s go,” she said.

Laurea watched as Kina strolled out of her room and into ours to brush her teeth on her own terms. The whole exercise took two clock minutes. From inside my own messed-up brain, I cannot explain it—the whole secret pivots on the difference between “a toothbrush” and “a minute”.

I told Laurea that it feels at times like I know what I need to do, but the thing I need to do lies behind one of twenty identical doors, each of which opens into a fantastic room that must be fully explored. It is conceivable that the first door I open at random will contain the task others expect me to do, and that I will deliver the expected result in a timely and predictable fashion. It is far more likely that I will open a door that contains every video on YouTube of home hobbyist iron-smelting setups. This is not a sustainable way to live in modern American society.

In order to cope with and respond to this mental superpower of mine, I have learned to reduce and name all of the doors. At my corporate job, this plays out as a relatively tedious choice: “It is time to either write the memo,” I will say, “oorrrrr to pay the invoices.” The memo. The invoices. At home, it might mean: “I will now either help Kina with her math homework or do the dishes.” The math. The dishes. None of this is about time, but about objects that are present in my field of view—objects that consume the entirety of my field of view. The iron smelting is not present. The memo is present. The dishes are present. We label the doors so that we know what the options are.

For Kina, I have simply labeled all her morning doors with an intentionally-unstructured to-do list. She can, at any time, pick anything at all from the ten things she must do every morning—from getting dressed to brushing her teeth to packing her snack. She can put on her socks before brushing her hair. She can fill up her water bottle before or after breakfast. Every morning, she gets to watch one little curious educational video with me; she can do that whenever she’d like. Recently, I took “watch a show” off the morning to-do list and wrote “WEEKEND” on it, and she simply stopped watching a show in the morning.

Realizing that my own coping mechanisms help Kina with her morning is bittersweet. There are a lot of times that I wish my brain worked like Laurea’s; we are all rewarded for being clock timers, and I’m glad at least one of us can help the other two fit into that construct. Knowing that Kina might need to fit her square peg into the round clock face is a little exhausting for everybody. On the other hand, teaching Laurea about how Kina’s brain works has been immensely helpful to her, and it’s made me feel a whole lot less self-critical about my propensity to procrastinate. I’ll get around to it. Kina will, too.

This morning, when Kina was laying around in her room playing with slime after getting dressed, I heard Laurea offer to pick up the toothbrush—whenever she was ready. Kina smooshed up her slime for another few seconds and then trotted out of the room. It was time to go.

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