Trying to get my kids out of the house in the morning has caused more damage to my mental and emotional health than any other single factor. In an attempt to fix this, I have read every article ever published on how to do this better. Here is a
Greg Bruce: Getting your kids to school without tears or tantrums - yours
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Kids leaving the house in the morning: Harder than it looks.
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Oh yeah! Great idea! Why am I not using all that free time I have at night?! I guess I’ll get their breakfast and lunch and clothes ready somewhere in between getting them to do their homework, getting them to and from dancing or piano or soccer, making their dinner, nagging them to clean up, to get their pyjamas on, to brush their teeth, to get into bed and go to sleep? Maybe, along with getting up earlier, I should just go to bed later! Maybe we could just skip sleep altogether!
3. Get enough sleep
This one would be funny, if it wasn’t so cruel.
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4. Make it fun
Let’s examine what the “it” is we’re talking about here, and what it looks like, at, say, a typical 7.30am at my place: One child is going around complaining they’ve got a sore tummy they don’t have, while another has ignored 25 requests to brush their teeth. A third is crying because I’ve asked them to clean up the milk they’ve poured all over the floor. I’m downstairs in the laundry looking for matching socks, although I’m aware it’s many, many years since such a thing existed in my life. My wife is in the toilet, and so is my state of mind.
5. Bribes / threats
This advice is usually disguised with phrases like “Give them what they want” and “Impose consequences”, neither of which are fooling anyone. The fact these are included in these guides at all is a tacit admission by the authors that there are no real solutions, because parents only read stuff like this after bribes and threats have failed.
6. Checklists
Oh, how we’ve tried checklists! We’ve written them on whiteboards, we’ve printed them out and laminated them, we’ve stuck them on the fridge and we’ve put them next to the kids’ beds. We’ve got them to write their own checklists, for “buy-in” purposes. We’ve tried every permutation and style of checklist you can imagine and I can tell you exactly how well they work, which is very well for one day, and sometimes even for two, but then you find them under your kid’s bed six months down the track and feel your eyes moistening at the thought of how much effort and emotion you invested in creation and how much Netflix you could have watched instead.
7. Be clear and consistent / kind but firm / blah but blah
This type of advice all relies on the idea that your kids listen to or care about anything you say in the first place. If that was the case, you wouldn’t be desperately googling parenting help with every spare minute you don’t have.
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8. Be a good role model / be positive
You try being positive after an inadequate night’s sleep followed by 135 minutes of being alternately ignored and yelled at by three people you’re just trying to help.
My recommendations:
Give up. Stop hoping for a solution. There is no hope. You are wasting your energy by thinking this is a problem that can ever be solved. The key to making your peace with the situation is to accept it.
One day, and probably sooner than you realise, your kids will no longer be whining at you about going to school – they will be whining about the catastrophic climate change you helped cause and, more relevantly, the housing crisis you helped create, which will prevent them ever leaving you in peace.
