Stop the Morning Madness!

Are you struggling with getting your child(ren) ready and out of the house in the morning? Here are a few tips to help make it a little easier…

Make a simple routine to follow and provide simple directions. Keeping the same routine every morning will help create a habit. Providing a simple direction sheet, will make it easier for you to point to the directions instead of being the ‘bad guy’ or the ‘nag’ every morning.

For example, in our house, when my daughters were younger, we had the “High Five” morning routine.   They needed to:

• Make their bed -which I taught them to do by pulling the covers up as neat as possible and sliding out. It wasn’t perfect!

• Get Dressed -one daughter liked to pick out clothes the night before, the other did not.

• Eat Breakfast

• Brush Teeth

• Practice -we had some extra time in the morning when they were young, so they practiced violin for 5-10 minutes.

When they finished, they would find me and we would give each other a High Five.

I took pictures of the girls (only because I couldn’t draw cute pictures…) doing certain things and then glued them to a sheet of paper that was used as our Morning Routine sheet. They could follow the directions on their own. If one of the girls came to me with questions, all I had to do was ask where she was with her High Five or have her point to what she had already done.

When they got older, I wrote their High Fives on a White Board so they could check them off or erase them when done. I could also change a few things because we were used to the routine. It was mostly habit without a lot of thinking, and my girls were older and a bit more flexible than when they were younger. For example, practice violin could become ‘unload the dishwasher” or something else as needed.

I have a few other thoughts I’ll share in the future. Give these ideas a try and let me know how they worked for you or if you have other ideas – I’d love to hear about them.