159. How To Have Happier Mornings With Your Kids

We all want mornings to go well. Everybody up, everybody fed, everybody out the door without anyone crying, including us. But for a lot of us, that isn’t how it goes. If your mornings have been harder than you want them to be, this is the episode for you. This is Leadership Parenting: How to Have Happier Mornings With Your Kids

[00:00:47] Welcome back to Leadership Parenting. So glad that we get a few minutes together today,

[00:00:54] Especially as we are starting school, I think it’s great to talk about our mornings, because I’m [00:01:00] hearing that a lot as I’m working with moms. You’re up, you’re moving, you’re doing everything you’re supposed to be doing, and somewhere around the second time that you say the same sentence to your kids, you might feel something in your chest tighten, hear your own voice get a little tighter, a little thinner.

[00:01:13] And then someone can’t find a shoe, and someone else hasn’t touched the food that you prepared for them for breakfast, and you might hear yourself saying something in a tone that you just wouldn’t use with another adult in your life. Then we get everybody in the car, and it’s kind of quiet, and you’re driving and maybe replaying it and thinking, “Ah, I do this every single day. We’re losing our time together?”

[00:01:31] And it’s a precious amount of time before we send our kids off to school. I hear about that morning more than most anything else at the beginning of school so I had a mom last week. First sentence out of her mouth as we started to meet together was, “I need you to know that I am not a yeller.”

[00:01:45] And she said it really almost before she even said, “Hey, how you doing?” She had a seven-year-old and a toddler, and the seven-year-old was the one that the mornings were revolving around, trying to get this little guy to, um, I think first grade. Getting him dressed took 40 minutes. [00:02:00]Getting him to the table took another few minutes. And every single day, somewhere between the bedroom and getting in the car, she was losing it. And what she couldn’t get past for her frustration, it wasn’t just the yelling itself, it was that she could hear herself coming up onto that yelling and starting to have it build, and then it coming out of her mouth, and she couldn’t stop it I thought that was such an interesting distinction.

[00:02:23] Do you ever have a time where your emotions are intense, and you feel like you’re gonna yell, and you’re actually okay with it, right? You’re like, “This is appropriate. It’s appropriate that I raise my voice right now, that I escalate things.” And I know that might seem kinda counter to what we’re talking about in the parenting world, that you should never yell, but the truth is, you guys, I think that we do.

[00:02:42] We raise our voices sometimes so that we get the attention. Sometimes it’s because we’re out of our own emotional control, and other times it’s because we’re deliberately escalating it to that volume and that intensity. I want you to think about the difference there.

[00:02:55] Any time that you’re doing something on purpose, that you’re aware of, [00:03:00] that you’re connected to, I want to suggest to you that that is a totally different situation than when your nervous system is making the decisions because you’re getting so upset inside that it’s coming out, and you can’t control it.

[00:03:12] That’s that feeling of a volcano, and you don’t think it’s the right thing to use in the moment. You don’t feel good about the decision to yell, but it’s happening anyway. This was the conversation I had with this mom, and I was so grateful to her, for her to bring up that specific thing because I think that’s one thing we don’t talk about in the parenting world.

[00:03:32] We just put it in an all-or-nothing basket. Even though we say we shouldn’t do all or nothing, we do that even in how we teach, and I wanna clarify that because we are not robots. We are not programmed clones that know how to show up and be perfect all the time. There are times where you may choose that you’re gonna escalate this, and you’re gonna find yourself expressing your upset.

[00:03:53] Of course, we want to do that in a very managed way, in a very purposeful way where no one gets hurt, nothing is said that you [00:04:00] regret. That would put us in the other camp. Does that make sense? So as I was talking about this with her, she could really tell that what was upsetting her was that this was out of her control.

[00:04:09] She would be standing in the hallway, like literally having an out-of-body experience, watching herself say things that she really didn’t mean in a voice that she really didn’t want to use, that didn’t sound like her, and the whole time, another part of her was thinking, “What’s wrong with me?” And she tried everything that we try.

[00:04:26] Earlier bedtimes, a chart, waking her little guy up sooner, laying clothes out. Some of it would help a couple of days, and then it wouldn’t, and then she’d have to see that as evidence that none of it was a problem that could be solved, that the problem was her, that she just kept getting angry. And the truth is that it wasn’t her, the problem, the global problem, and it wasn’t him either.

[00:04:47] And when I sat down to make this episode, she is the person that I was thinking about because I wanted to kind of explain that to her at the time, and we were kind of breaking it apart. So I don’t think we had our brains wrapped around it like we did when we finished. [00:05:00] So I’ll come back to her at the end of our episode today.

[00:05:03] But that’s what I want for you, too. I want something that makes sense to you, Like some easy formula. Like, I could give you the perfect morning routine, where there are the steps, and if you do them in this order, your house is going to be blissfully serene and quiet and happy all the time . Well, it’s a great dream, and it’s not a bad goal. I, I think the all or nothing part is impossible, but it’s not a bad idea that we’re trying to shoot for something that feels calmer and sweeter and more peaceful. So I’m gonna put us back in the middle instead of all or nothing and just say, “Ugh, mornings are always gonna be this way,” or, “I need to have the perfect morning.”

[00:05:35] Let’s get back in the middle, and I want to start where I always start, which is with my own experience, at least with me, when I try to come up with formulas and plans, because I had five kids and a lot of mornings, uh, have all sorts of things happen. And I looked back through all of it for the thing that I did that maybe worked most of the time.

[00:05:52] And what I found instead was that it kept changing. What worked when my oldest was four years old did not work when there was a new baby in the house. And what worked in [00:06:00] one house with the schedule and everything that was set up in that situation didn’t work quite the same when we moved to a different house and a different school system.

[00:06:07] It was different when I was rested and life was steady, and I wasn’t kind of stretched thin, and mornings were just more manageable. And then when I was stretched thin, the exact same mornings with the exact same children with the exact same schedules kind of fell apart. And I thought, “Well, darn, I don’t have an exact science here to even share with you.”

[00:06:25] And I didn’t with that mom either that I talked to . So in preparation for this episode, I studied some of the most prominent parenting experts. I looked at what Dan Siegel says, and Ross Green, and Lynn Lyons, and Becky Kennedy. Then I went further out to Jane Nelsen, and Laura Markham, and Stuart Shanker.

[00:06:42] Did you know there are so many experts in parenting? They’re awesome, all of them. They’ve spent their life studying children and parents, and interactions, and how to help them. No complaints there. But this is what I found. They don’t always agree. Dan Siegel would tell you that a child in a hard moment can’t get to the reasoning part [00:07:00] of his brain, so you have to connect with him first and redirect him second, and anything you say before you connect with him is going to be lost in the cosmos. Ross Greene would tell you that your child isn’t refusing you, your child is missing a skill. His line is that kids do well if they can. – Boy, that’s what I believe as well. Becky Kennedy would tell you that your child is having a hard time, not giving you one, and that your job is to be sturdy Which puts the responsibility back on us, which I totally agree.

[00:07:26] We’re the leader parents. Jane Nelson would tell you that your child should build their own routine chart, and she might suggest that you photograph yourself with her doing each step and hang it where your child can see it so the chart becomes the boss of the morning instead of you. Great idea, right? She’s working with the brain’s ability to visualize things so that they’re prepared. Laura Markham would move almost everything up to the night before and have you wake up before your children do so that you’re prepared, so that all the obstacles and the tension that everybody faces is removed before you have to go in and get the morning done. And then there’s Lynn Lyons, who works with [00:08:00]anxious kids and anxious parents. She’d look at that same smooth, prepared, frictionless morning and say, “Be careful, because the more you remove every bump to keep your child from getting upset, the less practice your child gets at handling a morning that doesn’t go well.”

[00:08:13] And let’s be honest, most mornings are that way, right? Her point is that reassuring and rescuing can feel like love, but it can also teach a child that discomfort is an emergency that we need to avoid. So sit for all of that for a second. Markham says take the friction out.

[00:08:27] Lynn Lyons says kind of leave it in. Don’t take too much of it out. Both of these women have spent their whole careers helping families, and both of them are right about at least part of it. So if you’ve ever read four parenting books and come away with more confusion than when you started, that’s not you missing something.

[00:08:43] That’s what’s actually there. So in prep for this episode, I closed the books, I shut the laptop, I sat with what I do know.- I know how a child’s brain develops. I know what happens in our nervous systems as women when we’re under pressure. And when I looked at a morning through [00:09:00] that lens, our answer got a lot simpler.

[00:09:03] There is no right morning routine, but there are some things that we can put in place underneath our routines that can kind of be the skeleton or the bones or the infrastructure that help us have mornings that feel better. And I think your morning can look 100 different ways on top of this skeleton or this infrastructure, and it’s gonna be fine, as long as you’re paying attention to these four things. I’ll call them the four bones of our morning. Bone number one, here’s the first thing we need to know. Our children do not have our sense of time. We say things like, “Hurry up. We have five minutes. We’re gonna be late.” And we say them believing that we’re giving our children information. You guys, we’re not.

[00:09:44] To a young child, five minutes isn’t a length,

[00:09:46] It’s words. The ability to feel how long something takes, to look at a clock and understand what that means about the rest of your morning, to anticipate downstream what all of that means and that the task is running too long, it just develops slowly in a [00:10:00] child’s mind, that ability, and it stays unreliable a lot longer than we expect.

[00:10:04] A seven-year-old can tell you what the clock says and still have almost no felt sense of what 15 minutes really is. So when we say hurry, we’re asking our child to respond to a unit, a word, that they can’t resonate with. And when they don’t speed up, it can look like they’re ignoring you. But she isn’t just ignoring you.

[00:10:22] She’s- doesn’t have the equipment yet. The second thing, getting ready, it’s harder for their brain than it looks. Think about what you’re actually asking a child to do, to hold a sequence of five or six steps in their head and remember where they are in the sequence while their little brother is doing something much more interesting just next door

[00:10:40] And many times we’re asking them to start a task they do not wanna do and stop a task that they do wanna do. That could be getting up instead of sleeping. That could be putting on their clothes instead of playing with their car or their doll.

[00:10:52] And then we want them to continue through all of their tasks of the morning without being reminded The name for all of that is executive functioning. [00:11:00] It’s the set of skills that lets a person hold a plan, ignore a distraction, follow through. It’s the last system in the brain to develop. It’s not fully online until a person is well into their 20s, which means that in your house right now, you are the executive function.

[00:11:14] You’re the working memory, and that’s not a failure of parenting. That’s your job at this stage. This is where Dan Siegel’s language really helps us. He talks about the upstairs brain, the part that reasons and plans and considers, and the downstairs brain, the part that runs on automation and even survival.

[00:11:31] So under pressure, the downstairs brain takes over. A child who could recite the whole morning sequence back to you in the daytime probably can’t access it well at 7:15 in the morning on a Tuesday when everyone’s rushing around. It’s not that it’s gone. It’s just disconnected.

[00:11:46] It’s offline

[00:11:47] And here’s what our research says on this: adults are supposed to scaffold this for our kids. Harvard Center on the Developing Child talks about executive functioning as something adults build with a child over years [00:12:00] by structuring the environment so kids can practice at a level that they can actually manage, baby step at a time.

[00:12:06] So when you’re standing in the hallway saying your child’s name for, like, the fourth or fifth time, you’re not doing something wrong and neither is your child. You’re doing the thing to scaffold But if we don’t know that, it feels like we are talking to thin air. It feels like we’re being ignored. And when we get ignored, when it feels like our efforts are being disregarded, that can be interpreted as a threat, as, um, something that you have to defend against.

[00:12:32] That’s when you’re gonna start to feel that little fire in your chest start to build. And that fire is what heats up all of the emotions which lead us to things like yelling or huffing around or guilting our kids or rolling our eyes or even being distraught and throwing up our hands and saying, “Fine, be late.

[00:12:50] I don’t care.”

[00:12:51] When you have the understanding about what’s going on with your kid and why and what the process is and that this isn’t unusual and nothing’s wrong, we can start to change that feeling of threat in our [00:13:00] bodies. If you expect that this is what’s supposed to happen and that it’s not a sign that something is broken or failing, then it doesn’t get interpreted as being as threatening as it feels

[00:13:10] This is the core of, dare I say, anger management. When I worked with men that were having anger management problems, and a few of them even had to be mandated to therapy because of a court order.

[00:13:21] Because of some behavior that they had because their anger was out of control. The key to anger management is not changing your behavior. I know that seems like our end goal, and I guess that is our end goal, but the place of intervention is way upstream in how you’re thinking about things, how you’re experiencing the situation.

[00:13:37] Because if you walk into a situation expecting it to be one way and it’s not, that is a challenge for your brain. That’s where your brain starts to turn on the upset inside of you. And when you really have the idea that you are being disrespected or that you are being harmed even, or that it’s a hopeless situation and you’re doing everything you can and you’re facing destruction, you’re gonna see big [00:14:00] feelings come up.

[00:14:00] Either big worry, which is like anxiety or panic, or you’re gonna see big anger, which is what was happening in the anger management clients that we’re talking about. I don’t think most of us as moms have anger management problems, but I do think the same mechanism is occurring. We can feel it happening in our chests, right?

[00:14:20] Like, “This isn’t right. This shouldn’t be happening. I’ve done all the things, and it’s not working.” And that’s when everything escalates. So my effort here in explaining these things is that you and I get to recognize that this isn’t a horrible problem. This is maybe a problem for us getting out the door on time, but it’s not a disrespect to you as a person if you can understand that your children are not having this skill set yet, and when they don’t have the skill set, they’re not able to do it smoothly. And that has less to do with us from a responsibility standpoint, but also, we have power when we don’t take it personally to help our children learn those skills.

[00:14:57] So no surprise that it’s a [00:15:00] tough thing to get accomplished in the morning. Okay, the third thing That I want you to think about from your child’s perspective, and I guess yours too, but especially your children. Mornings are stacked with transitions. Think about it. Asleep to awake, that’s a transition for your child.

[00:15:14] All of this applies to us too, but let’s talk about our kids. Being in the bed to feet on the floor, pajamas to clothes, play to getting dressed, or maybe even stopping to play along the way, which is very common for kids, getting from that place to the breakfast table or the counter, getting from the counter to the door, house to the car, car to the school.

[00:15:38] And we could even break those down smaller, like getting your seatbelt on or getting your shoes on or all of those tiny little steps. What I listed was like seven or eight changes in under an hour, changes meaning transitions, and every one of them asks a child to stop something and start something else.

[00:15:52] There is not another hour in your child’s day that probably asks them to do that much, especially when they’re little

[00:15:57] And this is where almost every other [00:16:00] expert in the parenting world does agree. The transitions are the hot point. I love Stuart Shanker’s work. He talks about the difference between misbehavior and stress behavior, and about how much of what looks like defiance is actually a child who’s not connected to their resources.

[00:16:16] A child who melts down at the door isn’t making a stand about the shoes. He’s at the end of a stack of demands that started the second his eyes opened. And no, that’s not your fault. That’s the fact that he’s set up to be at school at a certain time, and he has a series of skills that he has to master to get there on time.

[00:16:34] You are the facilitator. You are the helper. You are the teacher. And eventually, as kids get older, you’ll be the coach, which means they’ll take more and more of that on themselves. When you see it that way, the morning stops being a discipline problem. It becomes kind of like a mental load problem, and it becomes an ownership problem.

[00:16:54] I think about my, like, really little kids, my four-year-olds, my five-year-olds, my [00:17:00]seven-year-olds.

[00:17:00] They were going to school because they knew that was the plan, and I would say most of the time they really liked school. But they live in the moment. School is next, right? It’s not now. Now they don’t want to move fast. Now they’re sleepy and they want to snuggle for five, 10 minutes. Now they don’t want to eat the eggs you made.

[00:17:20] Their stomach doesn’t really feel ready for breakfast yet, but they’ve got this little window. They got to get that breakfast in or else they’re not going to have any

[00:17:26] They see their toys from yesterday that we told them they could play with tomorrow, but they had to go to bed ’cause they have a big morning the next morning. And now they see their toys and it’s tomorrow and they wanna play with them. So they’re not putting their shoes on when they’re supposed to.

[00:17:37] They’re not finishing their breakfast when they’re supposed to. This is a live in the moment problem for us, but really not for our kids. And then we get frustrated, rightly so, because we have a tight schedule, and the school bell rings, and they’ll be tardy, and they’ll miss things. And then we’ll be late for the next things that come after that.

[00:17:57] But think about it from your child’s perspective. [00:18:00] They’re in the moment. How often do I wanna live in the moment? I hardly, rarely do. I’m always racing forward or thinking back on whatever was going on instead of staying in the moment. This is kids’ superpower, and this is what gets in the way of us having smooth mornings

[00:18:17] We have needs when we hit transitions. This is what I go deeper into in my back to school transitions workshop. Because a transition has its own set of needs I identified five things a child needs when they’re moving from one thing to the next. And I think once you can name them and you start seeing them, then it helps you understand everything better.

[00:18:36] Not just what happens at the front door in the morning, but also at bedtime, at the end of screen time, on the first day of anything

[00:18:42] There are probably more than five needs. I picked five really important needs

[00:18:46] And I love to study them and think about them and have them as a little backdrop in my mind when I’m working with children because it gives me a little bit of an idea of what might be causing some of the delays we’re seeing or some of the behavior we’re seeing, some of the tantruming we’re seeing, [00:19:00] some of the pushback we get.

[00:19:01] And if you can spot that, you can get to the core root of the problem. It might just be that your kids need more practice at following steps. That is normal. It also might be that they’re going through some separation, some fear of loss of being with you

[00:19:16] It might be that they like something that feels more familiar than what you’re asking them to do right now We go through all of that in the workshop, and I’ll tell you how to access that as we get toward the end of our episode. But the main thing is we are getting on the same side with our kids through this.

[00:19:32] And when that happens, you’re much less apt to yell or to say things that you don’t want to say, or even to feel so irritated. If I could gift you something, it wouldn’t be that you had kids that did things perfectly. It would be that you had this buffer around your stress system that it didn’t stress you out ‘ Cause the truth is your kids are gonna move as fast as they move.

[00:19:51] You could try a million different things, and you’re probably not gonna get them to move much faster until they’re ready, until they’ve learned the skill, until it seems to [00:20:00] work So what if we could let go of our most intense irritation and just be okay? Doesn’t mean we stop teaching or we stop trying It’s just so much more compassionate for us and better for our relationship okay, the fourth thing, and this relates to what I just said. Your nervous system sets the temperature in your interactions in your morning. There’s a study that I think about quite often. Researchers put moms through a stressful task while their babies were in another room. Then the mothers came back, and the babies hadn’t seen her or heard any of that stressful thing.

[00:20:31] They had no idea what had happened. And when the moms came back with the babies, they monitored the babies’ heart rates, and they noticed that the babies’ heart rates had risen, had gone up to match their mothers’. Not because of anything that was said or that the babies experienced, but just because they were near their mother whose heart rate had gone up.

[00:20:49] And the longer they stayed together, the more closely the baby’s rate and the mom’s rate aligned. They synced

[00:20:55] They call that stress contagion.

[00:20:58] Your emotional state is [00:21:00] not only yours. We share emotional state like the oxygen in a room. If you come into the morning already feeling behind as the mom, already running the list in your head, already watching for the tension points that your kids are gonna push back with you, your kids pick that up before either of you say a word

[00:21:17] then they are operating off of a stress response, which often then you pick up and it winds you tighter, and now you’re in a loop, and neither of you really started it on purpose. It’s just the nature of being in a situation where you’ve got a time demand, and our resources are smaller than the demand that we’re facing.

[00:21:35] . Okay, so I’m not saying this to have you feel guilty that the control lies in your hands. I want you to feel empowered, and I also want you to partner that with a routine that helps teach your kids the skills or the steps to get them out of the door.

[00:21:51] And I want to wrap all of that up with the expectation that it probably isn’t gonna work smoothly. So it leaves you a lot of room for it not to be [00:22:00] successful. And if it’s not successful, and it’s not because sh- of you, then it’s not threatening. It’s not successful because they don’t have the skills yet, and they can’t have the skills until they learn them this correlates with the two jobs of parenting. You have the job to love and connect with and keep your attachment with your children strong. That’s why we get upset w- when we yell, because we feel like, “This doesn’t feel good to my relationship,” right?

[00:22:24] “This isn’t how I wanna show up with them, and it’s not how I wanna send them off to school.” And then we also have the second job in parenting, which is to teach them the skills and get them to school on time. I mean, there’s consequences for being late to things, that we know that when they’re adults, if they don’t know how to get to work on time, that that could affect them or cause problems in their relationships.

[00:22:43] So we have the responsibility to teach them the skills and make a family system work smoothly, but we also have the job to have them feel connected and loved and attached. So what I’m saying is, let’s work on not being so upset that it is anybody’s [00:23:00] fault, nobody’s fault, and also work on creating routines that have more room for success in them.

[00:23:07] Researchers reviewed 50 years of work on family routines, and what they found is that routines do matter. They connect to how children adjust and to how competent parents feel, which aligns with our whole discussion that we’ve had so far.

[00:23:20] But what they noticed is that it’s not what’s in the routine that matters so much, it’s the predictability and the meaning of the routine. So not the content, but the predictability of it and the meaning. 50 years of research and not one line about what time your children should be dressed and out the door.

[00:23:37] So if you’ve been carrying a picture in your head of the morning you’re supposed to be running and measuring yourself against it every day, you can put that down. Your morning doesn’t have to look like hers or hers. It has to be predictable to your children, and it has to account for those four things.

[00:23:52] So let me give you what to do with all of this. The first one: move the decisions out of the morning. Every choice your child has to make before 8:00 in the morning is probably [00:24:00]withdrawing from an account that’s not really open and running yet for him. Clothes chosen the night before will help, backpack by the door, breakfast is narrowed to two options that maybe you know they’re gonna like and that are easy for you

[00:24:11] We’re not doing this to be efficient. We’re doing this to try to protect the demand that falls upon you and your child in the morning. You want the resources that you have to be spent on the most important parts

[00:24:23] So we want to take the load off of things that are developmental, meaning the sequency, the remembering, the sense of time because those aren’t things your child is choosing to mess up They don’t have a good sense of that because developmentally their brain isn’t ready for it yet or isn’t mastering it yet is another way to say it.

[00:24:38] They need to practice it but they don’t have it down That’s always going to be a tension part in your morning. Can we accept that? If we do, we’re gonna feel a lot better

[00:24:48] So instead of, oh my gosh what is going on with my four-year-old? Why are they dawdling? This is crazy. We do this every morning. Instead say, this is what four-year-olds do. Makes sense. I’m gonna add five or 10 [00:25:00] minutes to our schedule

[00:25:01] It’s not really a problem. It could be irritating when it doesn’t match our expectation. Let’s just change our expectation when we can

[00:25:06] And then our kids are often annoyed it’s a school day. They might be disappointed about what we give them for breakfast. Ordinary disappointment is not an emergency, and it also doesn’t need to be solved. We could just say, “I get it. I know. We’ll work on that next time.” Second thing, make time something that your kids can see.

[00:25:22] Remember how they don’t know what five minutes is. They can’t feel it. So maybe we could give them a timer if we need it

[00:25:30] Steps written on a card where visually they can see, oh, this is what happens next, rather than trying to remember the steps because we said it or because they did it yesterday and they- we think that it’s established and they’re gonna do it again. We’re trying to help our kids own the sequence. That’s the skill-building, right?

[00:25:47] And you get to step out of the role of that person nagging them through it. If you know everything really important is in their backpack because you guys did it together the night before, or when they’re little maybe you even did it

[00:25:56] then let your kids own the rest of it. [00:26:00] Children who are given real ownership of a behavior tend to internalize it better. And yeah, they may not want to because they don’t care about it so much, so you might have to carry it a little bit longer, but you’ll watch for those little signs that help you know when it’s time for them to pick up something on their own and maybe even do it their way ‘ Cause when we manage them all the time without giving them any ownership of that, then we kinda have to, we can keep ourselves in that job until they can learn to manage it themselves

[00:26:23] The third one, let’s name the transition before it arrives. First, name it in your own head

[00:26:28] Because we might still be saying, “How hard is it to get out of bed and get in your clothes?” But for them, it might be really hard. So how can we help them make those little, tiny transitions? With kids, as playful as you can make it, the more successful you’ll probably be

[00:26:43] You can also speak the transition ahead of time. Something like

[00:26:47] When this is done, we’re gonna grab your backpack and go to put your shoes on

[00:26:51] Or you could put some music on and say, “When these two songs are over, we need to be by the door ready to get in the car.” Getting close, getting [00:27:00] low putting a hand on a shoulder if that helps Eye contact. What you’re saying to your child when you do that is, “The information I’m about to tell you is really important and I’m gonna give it to you in one tiny bite-sized piece And make sure that you hear it so that you can be successful at it.

[00:27:15] So you’re kind of giving the brain a runway, and a child who’s warned about a change can start closing down what they’re doing, whereas a child that’s interrupted has to stop cold. And stopping cold is where their meltdown usually happens. And the fourth thing is yours. Before you wake anybody up, before you look at your phone, before the list starts playing out for you, give yourself just a couple minutes of

[00:27:38] Calm. , Put both feet flat on the floor. Feel the floor under them. Take a breath where the exhale is longer than the inhale. Do that three or four times. Because a long exhale is one of the few direct ways to tell your body that you’re not in danger

[00:27:51] Let your eyes just look around the room, land on something in the room. It’s called orienting. It sounds a little strange, but it does something very specific. [00:28:00] Under pressure, our vision narrows. The body reads that narrowing as a sign that something is wrong. We’re widening our experience first thing in the morning on purpose and sending back the other signal that nothing is wrong.

[00:28:11] Takes just a few seconds, maybe 60 to 90 seconds, and if you can’t get it before your kids are awake, do it in the car after drop-off because it’ll change the rest of your day, even if it didn’t get to change your morning. Now, what is all of this for again? Not all meant to help you be more efficient. Remember how I said this might be a disappointing episode, that I don’t have a perfect routine for you that’s gonna take all the stress out of your mornings? It’s not for efficiency

[00:28:32] We’re trying to start our mornings with a little bit of connection. Connection to ourselves so that we can feel calmer, so that we can put into the air in the room more of a calm sense that our morning is okay. Connection with our kids before they walk out the door , and we’re separated from them for a couple of hours.. A little sweetness, maybe a little fun, maybe a little extra peace. Something that says we’re on good terms before you send them into the day I know that’s a big ask. [00:29:00]You’re in a hurry. You’re tired. Some mornings you’re counting the minutes until the door closes and they’re out the door. But every one of the four things I gave you is doing one job, and the job is to make a little more room.

[00:29:09] Because if the sequencing is handled, and all the clothes are picked, and you’re not sprinting, then there’s space for that little small snuggle or a few sweet words. And if you’re ready early, maybe an actual short conversation, but with low expectations. We’re not trying to have all these meaningful, deep moments every morning, just noticing how to have a little more sweetness

[00:29:29] It takes us being regulated so that we have something left to give our kids in the morning. And here’s what I know about this season. It feels like it’s getting away from us, this time where we raise our kids. I think that’s why back to school is so tender. It’s evidence that our children are one year older.

[00:29:42] We’re marking this pathway to adulthood

[00:29:45] And it’s going fast, and they’re growing up. And sometimes it feels like we’re behind the ball before we even start. So think about where you can take back a small piece of your morning, and maybe go to bed a few minutes earlier so you’re not starting the day so tired. Then maybe you get up five [00:30:00] minutes before everyone else so you’re not sprinting to catch up, so you can go to the bathroom before you’re chasing somebody down the hall That’s what I invite you to think about this week.

[00:30:07] What do you need in order to get a few sweet minutes with your babies before they go out that door? And then lower your expectations about how it’s supposed to look, and take a breath

[00:30:17] and know that you are not alone. We are all having mornings like this

[00:30:21] So here’s what I wanna leave you with. You’re not missing a formula that everybody else has, ’cause it doesn’t exist. The people who study this for a living can’t agree on what your morning should look like, and that’s because your morning isn’t supposed to look like anybody else’s.

[00:30:32] It’s supposed to fit the children in your house at the ages they’re in right now, with the amount of capacity that you have this season. And it’s gonna change. When there’s a new baby, when you move, when someone starts middle school, when you’re going through something hard even, the routine you build this fall is not the one you’re gonna need next spring or next fall.

[00:30:49] That’s not failure. That’s you paying attention and adjusting

[00:30:52] Once you know what’s happening and why you get those feelings and why your kids are dawdling, I think it will help you feel less fearful, [00:31:00] less threatened, and have happier transitions from morning to your day.

[00:31:04] I told you I’d come back to the workshop. It’s called Back to School Transitions, and it goes into much more detail on what actually helps a child move through a transition, including the five needs I mentioned earlier. It’s free for the whole month of September. You can find it in the show notes for this episode, episode 159 at my website leighgerman.com

[00:31:21] I think it’ll help you shift how you look at transitions for your kids. –

[00:31:26] I love protecting our families by protecting you, by helping your heart feel calm, , and that all those feelings that feel like failing are really just feelings of loving your kids and wanting so much to serve them in the best way possible.

[00:31:39] We can figure this out

[00:31:40] I believe in you. I’m so glad that you spent this time with me. I look forward to seeing you next week. Take care

[00:31:47] The Leadership Parenting Podcast is for general information purposes only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this [00:32:00] podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice. only. It is not therapy and should not take the place of meeting with a qualified mental health professional. The information on this podcast is not intended to diagnose or treat any condition, illness, or disease. It’s also not intended to be legal, medical, or therapeutic advice.

[00:32:27] Please consult your doctor or mental health professional for your individual circumstances. Thanks again, and take care

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