Why Your Kid’s Bedroom Needs A Wall Calendar

When the three-year-old starts asking in February, “How long until Christmas?” you know you’ve got a problem. Around that age, they’re old enough to anticipate and look forward to things like holidays, birthdays and vacations. But they’re not old enough to have a grasp on how long “10 months,” “18 days” or even “a week” is.

But Reddit user u/SquaredCircle84 came up with a solution for that. When their four-year-old son started asking how long he had to wait until his next birthday (it’s not until October, the poor kid), they decided to hang a good old-fashioned wall calendar in his bedroom.

Together with him we marked important dates on it—mostly family birthdays and holidays. Now if events are more than a week out and they pertain to him, we add them to the calendar as well, and he can count down the number of days/weeks until said events. In the process, he’s learning about the days of the week and months of the year … At the end of each day before going to bed, we cross off the day together.

There are lots of calendars out there specifically geared toward teaching kids about the days of the week, the months and the seasons (we had this one when my son was little), but it’s still hard for them to get a handle on how far away anything much longer than a week is. But a wall calendar, with its little boxes you can cross off each day, can be a time-grasping game-changer.


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