Sit on your hands

You've handed over the bag. It's the next morning and Leo is on the landing looking at it, and you're standing there with your keys, and the hand is moving. This chapter is about the next four minutes.

Stand somewhere else. The takeover needs you within reach. If you're in the kitchen with the kettle on, you can't do the bag, and neither can the hand. Be near enough to hear and far enough not to help. For a four-year-old with shoes, that's sitting on the stairs with your hands in your lap. For a fourteen-year-old with a form, it's the next room.

Say less than you want to. The commentary is a takeover with words. "No, the other loop." "You've forgotten the bottle." "Is that how you spell it?" Each of those moves the job back to you, because now the child is following your voice rather than their own plan. The things worth saying are short and few. "That's the hard bit." "Take your time." "Check it against the list." If they're stuck and haven't asked, wait. Stuck is where the working out happens, and it looks like nothing.

When they ask, give the least help. Chapter 8's rule. Hold the shoe. Point at the pile. Say the doctor's name. Then take your hand away and let them finish. If you find you've done the whole strap, that's a takeover, and the answer is to notice it and to hand the next strap back, not to undo the first.

Praise the go, not the result. When the bag's packed, badly, say that it's packed. Don't say it's brilliant, because it isn't and they know. Don't say what's wrong with it, because that's the redo. "You did your bag" is enough, and it's more than they've been getting, which is nothing, because until today the bag wasn't theirs to be praised for. There's a whole book to be written about what to praise in children, and it isn't this one, but the short version is that a child praised for the attempt attempts again.

Don't watch the clock out loud. If the margin's there, and chapter 21 is about making sure it is, then the four minutes aren't a crisis and shouldn't sound like one. "Hurry up" is the hand in a different form.

I'd expect the first morning to take three times as long and the child to be worse at it than you'd feared. That's normal and it's the price, and it's paid once. By the second week the bag takes Leo two minutes and you haven't thought about it, and that's the moment to notice that you've had two minutes and a job back, and to look for the next one.