The Problems of Not Being On Time
A mother wrote me and said, “My daughter, Mia, was assigned to prepare dinner for the family. She decided to try a new dish, but she did not allow the additional time required for doing something for the first time.
"So dinner was late. She lost her media privileges for the next two days because we have been over this exact issue before.”
Notice that Mom imposed a consequence, and she did that only because using words to teach had been ineffective. Good for Mom.
This lesson is very important. Being late is a much bigger deal than people realize. Once you're late, everything else falls apart. You can't feel responsible. Now you’re in a hurry, which makes it much harder to feel loved or loving. Panic tends to trump the good feelings and choices. All from not paying attention to time.
Mia responded to Mom by saying, “I was making a new dish. I didn’t know how long it would take. I started cooking at the regular time. That was wishful thinking. I needed to start at least an hour earlier. I could have started right after school. If I had finished early, there’s no problem with early. Why risk being late?”
No kidding. Pretty bright response from Mia.
Teaching Being On Time
Mom told me that she’d also noticed kids being 30 seconds late for family meetings. Then a minute, and it was getting worse. No big deal, right? WRONG.
Mom told everyone that from now on, they had to be at the meeting five minutes early in order to be on time. Of course, one child arrived at the next meeting four minutes and 50 seconds before the start time.
Mom pointed that out, and the child said, “Think about it. I was actually here within the FIFTH minute before the meeting, so I wasn’t really late.”
Clever but insanely wrong. What if you show up at your plane flight on the right DAY but wrong time, claiming you’re on time? Laughable.
What if you go through an intersection ONLY ten seconds after the light turns red. You’d be within “the minute” of the light turning, so that counts for something, right? Yes, it will eventually count you DEAD, and all because you had a loose relationship with time.
Keep teaching them the importance of keeping a commitment completely.
- At Wal-Mart, you bring an item to the check-out that costs $10. But you pay $9.50 for it and walk out. You just changed an enjoyable purchase into shoplifting.
- As you land an airplane, you touch down ONLY ten feet short of the runway. Is that an “almost” success? No, often, it can be an explosion and death.
Solutions for Being On Time
Do MORE than asked.
Arrive EARLIER than instructed.
Gather MORE information about an event or project than everybody indicates would be “enough” (usually barely enough).
Brief story: I personally know a man who spent 19 years and 360 days in the military. At the time—rules are changing, apparently—if you completed 20 years of service, you then received a retirement payment every month for the rest of your LIFE, at a rate of 50% of your base pay at retirement. For many people that’s enough to live on.
This man was short of 20 years by FIVE days, but the military discharged him with NO retirement pay. NOTHING. Sounds unfair. No, it wasn’t. For several years they had been telling him that he couldn’t receive retirement unless he met the military standards for body weight within five days prior to his discharge.
Month after month, he planned to lose the weight, but he did nothing meaningful about it. He knew he was close to the maximum weight, so occasionally he’d lose a couple of pounds, but that’s all. When the prescribed day arrived, he was FOUR pounds over the weight limit. He took off his watch, emptied his pockets, eventually stripped naked.
FOUR pounds overweight, so he lost a LIFETIME pension that would have supported him and his family. That loss of income caused additional stress on his wife, kids, and himself, which then contributed to divorce, alcoholism, and, eventually, his death. All because he put off the deadline in his mind and missed the target by a hair.
What Happens When a Child Isn't On Time
Traditionally, when a child is late, the parents tend to shame them:
“So you think you’re more important than other people?”
“Do you realize that you’ve made everybody wait because of your lack of planning and courtesy?”
“What will other people think of you when you’re late all the time?”
Some of that makes some sense—minus the shaming—but the real problem with being late is not about inconveniencing others. Here’s what happens when a child is late:
- It creates a moment of being irresponsible. This becomes a pattern that extends everywhere else in their life. Destructive patterns always begin with “small” mistakes that are not corrected.
- When a child is late, they’re obligated to make an excuse. Now we’ve added lying to irresponsible, and we have yet another soul-sucking pattern.
- It appears to be small, so the pattern grows insidiously, like a cancer. If tardiness were a big “crime,” like robbing a bank, we’d stop and do something big. Being late is dangerous precisely BECAUSE it seems like it’s not a “big deal,” and there are so many excuses for it, and so many people do it. Cancer.
- People don’t trust you with time or anything else. Slowly you isolate yourself from exactly the kind of people you’d really like to associate with, the people you need.
So, Mom, don’t give up teaching exactness and integrity in keeping agreements—about time, completion of jobs, preparation, whatever. You’re saving your children’s lives. All of us are.
