Morning Rush

Getting out the door can feel like a three ring circus!

Mornings getting ready for school can feel like such a circus in our house. Since my husband leaves before dawn for work, I am on my own to get the girls ready and out the door. It has been this way as long as we’ve been together and while there are times that I feel it would be helpful to have another adult to help wrangle, what I feel like I really need is a cattle prod!

There are days that we barely make the bus, one kid with their jacket dragging down their body, another kid with their backpack hanging by one arm, and the third running out the door with their shoes untied. Occasionally we hit it out of the park – up early! Enjoyable breakfast! Time to read or talk! Most of the time though, it is somewhere in the middle – making the bus but with lots of rushing, lots of chaos, and more stress than I would like as we all start our days. To be frank I kind of dread weekday mornings. I have such hope for how it could be…and then it devolves into a foot race leaving me sweating and the girls semi-frazzled. I will say I seem more impacted than them, they regularly leave for school with a hug and a smile while I often need 5 to 10 minutes of quiet to recover from the tornado that just whipped through our home. Sigh.

For a while I thought it must be me; that I’m not doing enough to prepare in advance, or maybe I’m not organized enough? (Mom guilt anyone???) Then I thought maybe my kids are just out of control and like the chaos. ACK! Except that isn’t exactly right – we have lots of systems and routines in our house, my kids have expressed feeling stressed when they feel rushed, they very much do not enjoy chaos, and they don’t like missing the bus. Besides, I know that organization is kind of my thing and my kids feel better when we are sorted. So what in the world is the answer??

I know the advantages of planning and execution of steps toward a goal, both from my personal life and also from my training as an educational psychologist. So, providing concrete supports to my kids for what we call executive function, has been a priority for me as a parent. It has also helped save my sanity on more than one occasion. Executive function is an umbrella term for a bunch of different skills that reside generally in our frontal lobe. It includes things like goal setting, initiation of tasks, organization and planning (of time, tasks, etc.), impulse control, and flexibility (of thoughts, emotions, responses). It improves with age, meaning that toddlers and preschoolers have basically nonexistent executive function while teenagers have more developed brains and thus more developed executive function skills. My kids are neither age, and so they fall in the ‘emerging’ zone of executive function. Their brains are still working on growing into the prefrontal cortex and expanding sophisticated neocortical functionality. What that means for me is that they still need regular reminders and scaffolding for how to transition between activities, to ignore the sparkly distraction in front of them in favor of the bigger goal, or how to regulate their emotional experiences so they can stay focused and on task.

There are things I do to help with this – checklists for routines, verbal reminders, visual cues, time limits…the only thing about that is – it’s tiring! I have found ways to streamline some of these; I use laminated printouts for the checklists, white boards for daily schedule reminders, a family calendar in the front hallway, and regulation skills that have been practiced since the girls were babies, like belly breathing and grounding. I have scripted phrases that I use for repeatable reminders so I’m not losing my mind (or overwhelming their brains with too many words)trying to keep them on track. Things like “hocus pocus let’s all focus!”, and “helping means listening”, or “time to get dressed, brushed, & washed!” and I am a big fan of the microwave timer. There are other ways to streamline the process as well: using an old school analog clock (you know, the big circle kind) marked with dry erase markers to signal the passage of time, posting a weekly schedule on the refrigerator, having a landing spot for school materials (we actually have a launch spot – everything you need for school sits by the front door, ready to grab and go). All of these can help ease the burden I feel in trying to keep three squirrely girls on track, and helps build these neuronal pathways in the girls’ brains. Yet they are not foolproof.

What I have to remind myself of - regularly - is that their brains are still learning and learning is not a linear process. For them, or me. Meaning that some days they are going to knock it out of the park and other days they are going to knock me down. While I can see that the bus will be here in 8 minutes - which means that we have to be getting socks and shoes and jackets and hats and gloves on in 3 minutes - my kids usually think “the bus will be here soon I’ve got plenty of time!” or maybe they see it the way I do and jump up on the get ready train. My goal is to get them on that train more of the time.

It’s important for me to model for the girls that while we don’t always have to be on task 100% of the time, there are things we can do to offset the stress we feel when we are running behind, so we don’t feel rushed and overwhelmed as we start our day. This allows a bit of space for me to be patient – with them and myself – as they keep working on becoming more adept at these routines.

I also want them to know that if we miss the bus - like we did this morning! -because we just couldn’t get it together, it isn’t the end of the world. It might be frustrating, but part of executive function development is emotional regulation and increasing capacity for tolerating stress, so even if we don’t hit our goal we have another chance to help our brain, and our child’s brain, make those new connections. We can get to school another way and try again tomorrow. And all of that can happen without the circus coming to town.

Parenting is hard. Mornings are hard. Executive function skills make it (a little bit) easier.