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Slow Living Family: How to Make a Peaceful Evening Routine

two girls reading on bunkbeds at bedtime

Do you want to develop a simple, peaceful evening routine for your family? Are you dabbling in slow living practices and want to figure out how to turn the madness of dinner+clean up+bedtime with small kids into something resembling intentionality and a peaceful bookend to your day?

And maybe cut out the yelling for kids to just “GO TO BED AND STAY THERE!”?

Welcome, friends. I have BEEN THERE and my husband and I have faced the same challenges. I’ll be sharing our tips and tricks to turn our evenings into a peaceful, connection-oriented routine.

If this topic is of interest to you, you may find my post on constructing a peaceful morning routine also helpful, or 15 ways our family practices slow living with our young kids.

We are big fans of living simply and intentionally around here. If you resonate with that, my post on how to embrace simplicity as a family might be helpful as well. And I’ve done another post on our peaceful morning routine, which you also might want to check out.

This post contains some affiliate links, which means I make a small commission at no extra cost to you. See my full disclosure here.

What is happening during an evening routine?

I think of the evening routine as the period of time and the activities done from dinner preparation until everyone in the household is asleep.

Specifically, this period of time include dinner prep, eating dinner, dinner clean up, bed time process for the kids, household prep for the next day, and the parents’ bedtime.

What does a messy evening routine look like?

Sometimes the hours between 4pm and bedtime are misery as a parent! And since this time includes some intense moments for parenting, evenings can get rough!

There are some big challenges during the evening time. These challenges include (but are not limited to!):

  • getting kids to EAT the food you make
  • persuading kids to stand still with their mouths open but NOT TALKING long enough to brush their teeth
  • convincing these little people to stay where you want them to stay, possibly even after you leave the room

A messy evening routine is, ultimately, one that is not working. Needed tasks aren’t getting done, or not getting done in a smooth manner. Tension and stress is high. And rather than everyone in the family enjoying themselves (at least, mostly!), the day ends with everyone feeling disconnected from each other and bummed.

Perhaps it is easier to focus on what an evening routine SHOULD do.

Family sitting around living room in evening

What does a smooth, slow living, peaceful evening routine with kids look like?

The goal of a slow living evening routine is to do several things:

  1. Accomplish the tasks that need to happen. (ie: food inside bellies, kids prepared for bed, food put away so it doesn’t spoil)
  2. Set up the household and family for the next day. (ie: tidy up the household, ideally prep food for breakfast and lunches)
  3. Provide a peaceful, connection-focused conclusion to the day
  4. Allow everyone to unwind and prepare mentally, emotionally, and spiritually for (hopefully) restorative rest

As a family that practices slow living, we are looking for ways to cultivate connection in our home and intentionality in actions toward a purpose we have chosen and want to fulfill.

Ultimately, we want our values of honoring and loving each other and maintaining a peaceful, pleasant home to be core aspects of our slow living evening routine.

This may look a little different for each family. And even within the same family, it may change and morph over time. Because really, an evening routine is meant to serve the people of the home.

Nobody wants to be a slave to their evening routine!

But there are some steps everyone can take to create a peaceful, slow living, relationship oriented evening routine.

baby getting reading for bed

10 steps to build a (mostly) peaceful evening routine for the whole family:

These are the steps Gabe and I have worked through in order to build our family’s peaceful evening routine. Of course, in different seasons of life, we have to come back and adjust and troubleshoot.

But overall, these steps have been very helpful for us to work out our evening routine.

Step 1: Budget your time with a values-based approach first

This might be one of the hardest parts of embracing a slow living, peaceful evening routine. You need to get clear on what you truly value.

In a different season of life, Gabe and I valued getting to socialize in the evenings and sleep as late as possible in the morning. Our evening routine when we had just Mara looked a lot different than our routine now!

We used to joke that she was more of a “Mediterranean style” kid, with a late bedtime. Mara’s personality worked OK with that – she was a chill, content-to-sit-on-your-lap-and-cuddle kind of child.

As we’ve grown as a family in diversity with personalities, we have begun to value time together more, and being really intentional with book-ending our days (mornings and nights) with connection.

As a result, our social calendar has scaled back a lot. Gabe and I have realized we want to give good, quality time and attention to our kids first before distributing that time and attention elsewhere.

We want our family relationships to be the strongest relationships in all of our lives.

So as part of our slow living practice, we have chosen time together as a family most evenings as our highest time-allocating value.

This means we eat meals together around our dinner table, ideally in a non-rushed way. And we attempt to shepherd our kids through dinner, clean up, and bedtime with an air of patience. We try to do ONE connection-focused activity during the bedtime routine.

And we make decisions about our social calendar, extracurricular activities, and meal prepping to align with our values.

We have needed to construct our life around the value of unhurried, intentional time with our kids.

Girl holding empty bowls

Step 2: Define your priorities for what tasks to do during a peaceful evening routine

Identifying what YOUR family’s priorities are is going to be a great place to start. This is practical, what-we-want-to-accomplish-MOST-in-the-evening sorts of things.

Do you want everyone in bed by 7pm? Or is 9pm a reasonable time for your family?

Is it important that you have read aloud time every night? Or is bath time essential?

The reality is, you can’t do everything all in one evening routine. But you can identify what the most important one to three things are to you and work to incorporate those things into your routine.

One exercise I’ve found helpful to do is to list out all the things I want (or need) to do for our evening. And then number them in order of priority – highest number gets the highest priority.

Some things on my list, with their subsequent priority, are:

  • Read aloud to the kids for 10 minutes (2)
  • Shower (we don’t have a bathtub) (1)
  • Brush and floss teeth (8)
  • Tell the kids a story from our childhood (3)
  • Pray with the kids (4)
  • Speak blessing and acceptance over each kid (7)
  • Hug and kiss each child (6)
  • All kids actually asleep (!!) by 8:30pm (5)

What’s interesting about this exercise is that sometimes the things you list first and initially think are really important actually aren’t your highest priority when it comes to constructing a peaceful evening routine.

Reading aloud to my kids is a high priority for me in life. But the thing I NEVER miss at bedtime is teeth hygiene. That is my actual highest priority. Even if we get home from someplace at 10pm at night and everything else gets scrapped, I will still brush and floss the kids’ teeth.

I recommend making a list and then forcing yourself to prioritize each item on the list.

Family holding newborn baby after a natural home birth

Step 3: Consider the different ages and developmental stages for your kids

One of the factors to consider in planning for a peaceful evening routine is your specific family’s make up. A family with four kids ages 5 and under will operate differently than a family with three grade school age kids.

All kids can learn routines and steps in a process when they are repeated night after night. But older kids will likely require a little less hands-on help than younger kids.

Our kids range from 7 months to almost 7 years old as of this writing. Our baby is just starting to integrate into the family’s evening routine (depending on his naps and wake windows). But all three older kids are on the same schedule for their evening routine.

It can be tricky to work with different ages. But we have tried to make our evening routine something that everyone can participate in and enjoy aspects of. Even if not everyone enjoys the SAME aspect of the evening routine.

My encouragement would be to take note of the ages and developmental stage of each child. It might be helpful to consider what things are connection-focused for your specific kids.

Maybe reading a picture book is perfect for your kids, or maybe chapter books are more the thing. Or perhaps working a puzzle together is a nice wind-down connection activity. Maybe a wrestling match is needed to get some wiggles out of little bodies!

Also, I’ve personally found it helpful to understand baby and toddler wake windows as well as sleep needs by age for my older kids.

If your children have similar sleep needs, you can probably keep them in sync for their evening routine. If they have very different needs, however, you may need to stagger the bed time routines.

Father and Daughters doing bedtime Bible Storybook Reading

Step 4: Work backward from the last-to-bed’s bedtime to structure your peaceful evening routine

Our kids usually go to bed between 7:30 and 8pm. But the reason for that is because my husband and I try to get to bed by 8:30-9pm.

We’ve established the kid’s bedtime based on our own bedtime and our goals and priorities for the evening for ourselves as well as for them.

Although we aren’t rigidly strict with exact times, we have tried to “anchor” our sequence of events for our evening routine to some target times. This helps us know if we’re staying on track or getting wildly off track toward our target bedtimes.

With a target bedtime for the kids of 7:30pm, we move backward from there to identify our target timelines for the rest of the evening routine:

  • Sleep clothes and teeth brushing need to start at 7pm
  • Dinner and household clean up starts at 6:30pm
  • Food is ready to be served at 5:45pm
  • Dinner prep starts anywhere from 4:30-5:15pm, depending on the meal
  • Household tidy up before dinner and kids showers (if needed) start between 4-4:30pm

Of course, usually the baby is waking up sometime during that list from his afternoon nap. And he needs to be nursed and have his diaper changed. So whenever I can err on the earlier side of the time frames to build in a little time cushion, that usually helps this evening routine feel a lot more peaceful!

So what time is the last person in your household’s bedtime? And how can you work backward from there to establish your target ideal evening routine?

mom reading to three kids in bedroom at bedtime

Step 5: Be willing to adjust your priorities for the day and night

There are a lot of things to consider when establishing a peaceful evening routine, and outside time schedules are certainly part of that.

For us, we don’t have a lot of outside time factors during our normal week that feel like they disrupt our evening routine too much. But I have had to be intentional about choosing priorities during the day.

I have decided to be very intentional with nap time so that we can try to set ourselves up for a more peaceful evening routine. Specifically, when and how long nap time occurs.

I want to keep nap time relatively short. And I want nap time to start early enough that Lazlo and Jemma (when she naps – about every 3rd day right now) both have about 5 hours between when they wake up from a nap and our target bedtime.

This means naps need to end at 2:30pm. Which for my kids means I need to start waking them up at 2:15. If I want Lazlo to have an hour long nap, that means nap time starts about 1pm.

And with nap time starting at 1pm, lunch needs to start no later than 12:30pm. Which means I need to start prepping lunch between 12 and 12:15.

In my experience, I have had to decide which thing I value more: a long nap time or a peaceful and smooth evening routine. For some families, you may have to decide if you want to commit to an afternoon activity that pushes right up against dinner time or keep that evening routine peaceful.

baby on dad's shoulders during an evening walk

Step 6: Add in your mandatory tasks after the values-based ones

Once you have defined what you value, and what you prioritize getting done, plan your time with those in mind first. And then add in the things that just need to get done.

For us, we know we want to have dinner together to keep our family relationships running smoothly. And we know there are a lot of benefits for our kids if we eat dinner together regularly. So we allocate plenty of time to do that.

Since Gabe and I both value communication and words, we always include telling our kids they are blessings. And we want to pass our faith on to our children proactively, so we pray with them and for them each night as well.

We also try hard to build in ONE connection based activity during the bedtime routine. Some examples are:

  • reading together
  • playing a card game together
  • doing a puzzle together
  • wrestling or going for a walk
  • telling stories from Gabe’s and my childhood

Basically, any version of relational connection we can manage, we go for that!

Around those activities, we schedule in things we must do:

  • clean up the food
  • wash the dishes
  • wipe down the counters
  • tidy up the house
  • brush teeth

We put the things we value most into our schedule first, and then we slot in the other things.

Deck view

Step 7: Start earlier than you think you need to for a peaceful evening routine

As you may have noticed, our “evening routine” actually starts late afternoon (between 4 and 4:30pm usually). This is because in order to try to keep things PEACEFUL, I don’t want to be backed into a corner rushing our evening routine.

Kids have a way of interrupting timelines and schedules. Life has a way of doing the same thing.

Heck, I have a way of interrupting timelines and schedules for myself (it usually involves picking up my phone!).

So I like to build in plenty of buffer room along the journey for our evening routine to help keep it peaceful.

If I find a task takes longer than I’ve allocated time by 3-5 minutes all throughout our evening routine, then by the end, we’re running 30-40 minutes late, and I’m feeling stressed.

But if I plan PLENTY of time for each task, and I find I have little pockets of peaceful moments along the way through most of the evening routine, when we hit an unexpected interruption, such as:

  • spilled kombucha
  • a temper tantrum
  • a chore that needs to be redone for quality control purposes
  • rice that has somehow exploded on the floor
  • a pee accident

we have both the mental and emotional fortitude to manage that unexpected event.

Basically, I plan extra time to try to proactively make room for completing the stress cycle from triggers that I know are going to emerge. I don’t know what those triggers are and exactly when they’ll happen. But I can still build buffer in our peaceful evening routine to help manage them.

water bottles being filled during bedtime prep routine

Step 8: Implement and run a trial for a set amount of time to see if you have constructed a peaceful evening routine

Once you’ve identified your values, clarified your priorities, worked out a routine with some target times to anchor the sequence of events with plenty of buffer time, you’re ready to run a trial.

Remember, it takes time to develop new habits. So if you are coming from a messy, stressful evening routine, mostly likely both you and your kids will need to develop some new habits around the evening routine.

As part of trialling the routine, and depending on your family’s age and communication abilities, it may be helpful to “set up” your family.

I’d probably say something like, “Hey guys, have you noticed our evenings are unpleasant because I get grumpy a lot? I’m going to try to make some adjustments to how we do things in the evening to try to make it more pleasant for all of us. We’ll be practicing and trying out some different things. I’ll give you reminders and explain as we go along.”

Also, to help kids feel a sense of security even as things change, you may want to include a checklist. My kids enjoy getting to visually see what they are supposed to be doing.

I do encourage you to expect a bit of initial resistance or a sense of feeling like you’re in unfamiliar territory as you trial your peaceful evening routine. That’s OK. Try to stick with it for at least a week or two to see what smooths out on its own, and what you need to come back to in order to adjust.

Simple Family Dining Room Chairs

Step 9: Evaluate after the trial and make adjustments

After the trial period, reconvene with your family (or at least your spouse, if your kids are too young to communicate) and evaluate how the routine has been going. Specifically, you can discuss some of these questions:

  • What are the friction points in this routine?
  • What other adjustments are possible to make?
  • Are we managing to accomplish our top 3 priorities?
  • Are we living out our values?
  • How do we want to change our evening routine?
  • During this trial, did we experience a peaceful evening routine?

It may take some creativity and some shuffling around of events in your schedule, but I do encourage you to evaluate, make changes, and keep at it. The joy of ending your day as a family at peace with each other and strongly connected is really sweet.

Step 10: Continue fine-tuning your peaceful evening routine as you go

Of course, life is messy and WE are messy (both physically and emotionally!). So you may not experience night after night after night of a consistent, perfect peaceful evening routine. Especially not right away.

But progress is great!

Keep at it – even if that progress looks like one peaceful evening routine execution per week for a few weeks. Assess what worked on that peaceful night, and try to adjust to implement more of those specific factors.

To be transparent, we don’t have a perfectly peaceful evening routine every single night.

On days that we stick to the schedule, remember our values, and manage to complete any stress cycles that get started, we have really beautiful, peaceful evening routine executions.

On days when our afternoon got off schedule, naps got too long or didn’t happen at all, we’re out doing things too late, dinner takes longer than I expect, someone’s tired or fussy or getting sick, our evenings can look messy.

But the benefit of having figured out what DOES work for us to have a peaceful evening routine is that we know what to come back to in order to reintegrate that peace back into our home in the evening.

And that is such an empowering feeling as a parent!

Some fun things we do in our slow living, peaceful evening routine:

If you’re excited about constructing and implementing a peaceful evening routine and you’re ready to get a little extra creative about it, these are some things we’ve enjoyed utilizing in our evenings:

Candle burning on table as sun is setting

Candlelight Only

This has been a relatively new part of our evenings, but we’re really loving it. (Although now the days are getting longer and we don’t actually need extra light – but we’ll reserve this idea for autumn.)

I stopped turning on the lights at night, and I just kept our candle from dinner burning on the dining room table.

We loved this addition to our evening routine for several reasons:

  1. The fading light was a tangible and clear reminder to our kids that the day was ending
  2. Not having bright lights come on seemed to really help the melatonin production in our kids AND in us
  3. Gabe and I got much less distracted in the evening with tasks or projects – having just one candle burning turns out to be pretty dim!
  4. The candle made our home feel extra cozy

The growing darkness ended up working like a timer for us, counting down the time of “productivity.” I found myself speeding through dishes and wiping down the counter with a single-minded focus that get them done very quickly since I knew it was going to be too dark to see things well soon.

Obviously, I know candles will probably only work during certain times of the year, but it has been a really fun addition to the evening routine for us.

Evening Playlist

This is also a new addition to our evenings, but I’ve been experimenting with having a play list that correlates to the energy of the routine. Something that I can turn on as we’re sitting down for dinner, and then the songs help cue our movements through the various events of our evening.

So the dinner music will be slower, jazzier, more conversation inducing.

And then the energy will pick up for cleaning tasks, and then gradually calm back down into lullabies to get ready for bed.

Card Game laid out on a table

Family Connection Activities to Incorporate into a Peaceful Evening Routine

Some of our favorite evenings are the ones where we have a little extra time to engage in a fun, family connection activity. This is our list of things we cycle through as connection activities:

Books. Obviously, we love reading books, so that’s what we do probably 70% of the time.

Card Games. We have some favorite card games that only take 10-15 minutes to play through a hand: Gnoming Around, Sleeping Queens, and Nuts About Mutts are three common choices.

Singing Hymns. I grew up singing hymns at the church my family attended. I was able to get my hands on one of the hymnals from that church. I’ve loved teaching my kids a handful of hymns.

Dance Parties. It’s Raining Tacos and Narwhal Eating a Bagel are two frequently requested songs to turn on and dance to. Usually, we’re all giggling before it’s done.

Telling Stories. Gabe has been telling the kids stories from his childhood and our life together before we had kids. He gives them titles like: “The Time Mama Fell Into Buffalo Poop” and “The Time We Stayed In A Treehouse” and “The Time We Killed a Centipede While Aunt Heather and Uncle Kyle Were Sleeping.”

Sometimes the stories are 45 seconds, and sometimes they take 5 minutes. The more he (and now I do it too!) tell stories, the more we seem to remember from our childhoods.

The kids LOVE the stories. They get to start building this picture of Gabe and I as more than just Mom and Dad. And it’s really fun to observe these various events in our childhood and young adult years through their eyes.

Special considerations and troubleshooting hurdles to make a peaceful evening routine

Usually there are hurdles to figure out how to overcome in any new routine. Here are some of our biggest hurdles we’ve worked through:

What if the house is a mess from dinner and the kids are tired and need to go to bed and there are multiple kids crying at once? What do you prioritize? Clean up or Bedtime?

If both parents are available, I would definitely recommend some type of divide and conquer during the evening routine. Trial and error which parent is better at doing which tasks, and see what tasks can be done with all the kids together, and which ones cannot.

In our home, I usually start the dishes immediately after dinner is done. Gabe and the kids clear off the table and do some table clean up (wiping down, cleaning up messes on the floor). Sometimes, giving the kids jobs to do helps keep the peace!

To be honest, although we’ve taught both girls how to do this, often one of them is doing it and the other is playing with Lazlo or Thad. Sometimes this means Gabe and I can blitz through clean up in 15 minutes, which is fine.

But if the “playing” starts causing crying, arguing, or other distracting noise, then Gabe abandons clean up and starts on bedtime.

Once I’ve gotten the kitchen done OR when the kids are escalating, I leave the kitchen and jump in to bedtime routine.

Often, Gabe and I will station ourselves at different places in the house to supervise. So Gabe might be in the bathroom and oversee toileting and teeth cleaning. And I might be in the kid’s bedroom getting Thad into his pajamas while overseeing the changing/clean up process with the older kids.

Sometimes, we just need to split kids up, though. One of us will take whichever child seems to be the instigator of conflict and accompany them through the whole bedtime routine. Then come back to help with the other kids.

kids running wildly during evening routine

What if the kids are overtired and they are getting hyper and amped up?

Our favorite trick is to use space limitations to our advantage. It seems if the whole house is available to run around and jump around in, the whole house will get used!

And a body in motion seems to STAY in motion. Versus a body at rest seems to STAY (slightly more) at rest.

On nights when everyone is getting amped, we take all the kids into their bedroom (a small, confined space) and try to do the whole bedtime routine there.

The goal is to get everyone onto their beds to help keep their body calmer when they are not being productive on a task.

Even if everyone isn’t finished using the toilet and getting their teeth clean, sometimes a few minutes of pause on their beds while I focus my attention on the child who needs the most assistance right then helps to calm down the situation.

This might look like me saying, “Jemma, I’m going to brush Lazlo’s teeth now. Mara is going to the bathroom. You need to sit on your bed and look through this Berenstein Bear book. I want you to be on your bottom, keeping all parts of your body on your bed the whole time. Do you understand me?”

Also, when we brush the kids’ teeth, we use a cup for them to spit into the vast majority of the time. Then we aren’t needing to have them at the bathroom sink for the toothbrushing process. This means we can do it when they are sitting on the bed more confined if needed!

What if the kids always ask for another book, another chapter, another story, or one more wrestle or game?

Ideally, we try to set limits BEFORE we do a connection activity. This always seems to help with expectations.

But if we didn’t set a limit, we just put a cap on it and hold that line.

For example, Gabe might initiate a wrestling match. Sometimes he says, “I’ll wrestle for 5 minutes.” When he does, he sets a timer and when the timer goes off, it’s time to be done.

Other times, he’ll put a cap on it when he judges they need to be done with something like, “OK, final time” or “Oh, someone’s hurt, I’m sorry, we’re all done now.”

The kids usually beg me for another chapter when I read aloud to them. I usually appeal to the clock if I haven’t set a specific chapter or time limit: “Oh, it’s 8 o’clock – that means we need to be done for tonight.”

I think one of the biggest thing Gabe and I have learned in the process of establishing our peaceful evening routine is that ONE connection activity at bedtime is a good amount for us.

Bedtime is not the time for us to relieve our guilt over lack of intentionality during the day by spending a lot of extra time trying to do multiple connection activities. Bedtime will go smoothest if we are consistent with it.

We’re not going to be able to maintain doing a card game, a wrestling match, reading three chapters, singing three songs, AND telling a story night after night. So we limit our connection activity to one thing every night. And then we come back tomorrow night and do another connection activity, and the next night, and the next night.

Eventually, our kids have learned there there will be another fun time tomorrow.

Peaceful Evening Routine Pinterest Graphic - Girl holding bowls and cutlery

What if the kids are really resistant to all the steps in the evening routine?

In our house, there always seems to be a reason when there is resistance.

The pre dinner clean up might be resisted because they’re having fun with an activity. If so, I will sometimes say, “If you are willing to work with me, you can leave out that specific activity and do all the rest of the clean up, then come back to play with that until I say dinner is just about ready. Then you’ll need to clean it up.”

Transitioning into bedtime after dinner might be resisted because they want to play more, or they don’t want to go to bed.

This is why we try to include some connection activity in the evening routine, so we can say, “Hey, the more efficiently we get through cleaning our teeth, the more time we’ll have for book reading once everyone is settled into their beds.”

If a child really resists doing everything we’re trying to do as a family, this usually means they REALLY need some individual connection with a parent, or they REALLY need sleep (or both!).

When possible, one of us tries to take that child for some one-on-one time away from everyone else to clarify which of those two things it is, and then meet that need. If they are really upset about something and need to talk, we will talk and jump back into the family evening routine when we are done.

And, if they are just exhausted, we’ll usher them through eating and teeth cleaning and bedtime independent of what the family is doing so they can sleep.

What if the kids seem to forget the steps in our routine or they seem to just be lost in the process?

I’d encourage intentional consistency with the routine for several weeks, and see if the kids are still lost and confused.

I do a lot of rehearsing and reminding with our kids. So as we’re finishing up eating at the dinner table, I’ll say, “OK, guys, we’re just about done with dinner. What is going to happen next?”

Then I let the kids tell me what they think is going to happen next.

Usually, they have at least some clue of the unfolding of the next hour. If they are too young to know that after dinner comes bedtime, then this is a good time to “rehearse” it for them.

You could say something like, “OK, we’re just about done with dinner. That means we’re going to move on to our bedtime process. Let’s see, we need to clean up the table, then clean our teeth, then put clean clothes on, put our dirty clothes in the washing machine, and then we get to read a book if we do all of that quickly.”

Any time I can, I like to give the kids some level of ownership over things. So sometimes I’ll say, “Alright, remember, we need to get changed, clean teeth, use the toilet, and fill up water bottles. What do you want to do first?”

They seem to remember better if they are bought into the process!

I hope this has been helpful for you figuring out how to create and establish a peaceful evening routine for your home. Let me know in the comments if you have other questions, or if you are planning to try this out!

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