...they have decided to take an agile approach to child development.

Scott and I have been discussing agile development this week as he was curious to understand what I would be learning in my Scrum Master course. As I tried to explain to him what agile and scrum are all about, I found myself relating to it in terms of the chores and responsibilities of our family.

That all made sense to him so as we talked about it more we figured it may be a good approach to child development. One thing I have read/heard about raising children is that you should give your children some control over their life. Allow them to make decisions rather than always saying no or telling them exactly what to do. These seems like common sense but when you are talking about a 5 year old do they really have the capacity to make their own choices? Anyway I won’t go off on that tangent, back to agile child development.

When Logan is old enough we figure we will create a big backlog list for all of her requests. Each week will be a sprint and we will allow her to prioritize her backlog list prior to the start of each week. The team (Scott and I), will then have a planning meeting to determine what items from the backlog list we will work on for that sprint. Much like a dev team, the parental team has a limited number of points they can handle in a given sprint. Since nothing is free in agile development the backlog list will also include items like cooking dinner, packing lunches and washing clothes. So if Logan prioritizes car-pooling to karate lessons or baking cupcakes for her class party before the start of the sprint, it may mean that laundry will have to fall off the accepted list of projects for that week. Sorry LoGo but those are the choices you made. Better learn how to do your own laundry or you can go to school in dirty clothes.