Hand it over slowly

The arrangement isn't the destination. It's the route. This chapter is how a task moves along it until the child is doing it alone, which is the standard you started with, reached by steps.

With you, then cued, then alone. Every task on the list starts wherever it honestly is. Packing the bag starts with you. Checking the list starts cued, with you standing there. Coming off the tablet starts cued, with the timer. Each moves one step at a time, and only forward when the current step has held.

One task at a time. Don't move everything at once. Pick the one that's most reliable at its current step, and move that. The kit, say, from with-you to cued, by stepping back from the packing and asking "what do you need?" from the doorway instead of the bedside. When that's held for three weeks, step back further.

Three weeks at each step. This is a rule of thumb and not a finding, and the notes say so. It's long enough for a routine to settle and short enough that the child isn't stuck at a step they've outgrown. If three weeks passes without a slip, move it. If there are slips, stay.

Remove the cue, keep the standard. When the kit has been ticked off the list for three weeks, take the kit off the list and see. If it goes in the bag anyway, it's moved to alone. If it doesn't, put it back on the list without comment, and try again in a month. Neither outcome is a letdown. Both are the handover working.

When it slips, back one step, not to the label. A task in the alone column that gets forgotten one Thursday isn't proof that the child can't. It's a slip, and the response is to put the cue back for a fortnight and then remove it again. What it's not is a return to "what is wrong with you", because nothing is, and chapter 23 is about the days when the word comes out anyway.

Let the child own the arrangement as they grow. At nine you make the list. At eleven they make it. At thirteen they decide whether they need one. Each of those is a handover, and the last one is the child taking over the arrangement itself, which is what self-directed means, and it's what Munakata's third transition looks like from a kitchen.

Expect the alone column to grow slowly and then fast. Little moves between nine and eleven, more between eleven and thirteen, and then, in most children, a great deal, as the functions Best and Miller described catch up with the tasks. The parent who's kept the standard at the age through those years arrives at fourteen with a child who does most of it alone and a relationship that wasn't spent on Thursdays.