Every school day is the same. Getting your kids off to school is torture. You dread it. You get up, put out a breakfast and start waking the kids. As usual they won’t get out of bed. You turn on the lights. They finally sit on the edge of their beds in a groggy state and complain about the clothes you picked out. They resist getting dressed. You fight and yell to get them dressed. Running behind schedule, breakfast is served late. Milk gets spilled because one of the kids needed “to do it themselves”. You clean up despite their tears and yours. A mad dash to the car follows with a piece of toast in your teeth and coffee thermos in your hand. The kids grumpily get out of the car at school and inform you that they left their homework at home. There has to be a better way.
Why are mornings so hard? What can make them easier? Children by nature resist activities that put demands on them. School by necessity fits this billing. To top off the demands schools place on kids, we put demands on children immediately upon awakening. It is one thing for us to spend a morning facing down our child’s resistance to chores but a whole different thing to face down their resistance in the short time we have before school. Parents have a consciousness for time. Children do not. So as we face their resistance to our demands (getting dressed, having breakfast, getting school lunch ready) and their resistance to school, we get progressively stressed over the time. Meanwhile they don’t care so much about the time and seem to revel in the battles with us. No wonder you have stress!
To fix your morning routine you can take some easy steps – and one hard one. First, prepare what you can the night before – put out choices of clothes, set the breakfast table, make school lunches, get backpacks ready. In the morning break the routine into stages – (1. get up and dressed; 2 have breakfast; 3. gather things; and 4. move to car). Give limited choices in each of the stages. (You can wear the blue shirt or the green shirt; you can have oatmeal or cheerios). No matter what happens you keep moving into the next stage. (“You can keep working on getting dressed but I’m moving onto breakfast.”) You may have to set a timer for each stage. Once the timer goes off you are moving on – whether they are ready or not. For a couple of days they may be playing catch up but then they will start keeping up.
The major step parents need to take is not engaging in the battles they want to wage. Remember it is through these battles that they control the mornings. If you don’t engage they must move along – after all, the timer says so.
In the evenings, discuss the morning and what went well and what went wrong. Don’t argue but make suggestions. Remind them about your commitment to the timer. Reassert that you are going to move along with or without them fulfilling each stage of the morning. The next morning do it again. Stay with it. Repeat this mantra – “Don’t engage in battles in the morning. Don’t engage in battles in the morning. Keep moving along.” Surprisingly over a short time your mornings, though never perfect, will be better.