Morning madness

Parent question: What can I do to keep from killing my kids when I’m trying to get them out the door in the morning?

As a rule, I’m opposed to homicide, so I want to try to help.

Difficulties getting families out the door in the morning are extremely common, and it is a significant source of stress for many families. For brevity, let’s call this “morning madness.”

One morning some years ago when our daughters were all at home and in school, we had a frustrating time getting everyone moving, dressed, fed, loaded into the car and delivered to school. On the way to work, I heard a news story on the radio that the time of day at which heart attacks are most likely is in the morning before work. “No wonder,” I said to myself.

I actually think morning madness is a complex problem, but, broadly, there are two categories of issues that contribute to it.

The first category is organization. Too much is being slapped together in the morning. Breakfast is being made and lunches are being packed. People are looking for the right clothes, items needed for school and for misplaced keys, wallets and purses. Many of these problems can be overcome by preparing the night before. We can pack lunches, choose outfits and bathe. But none of those are the kind of advice people need to hear from a psychologist.

The other category is behavior. Kids are told to get out of bed but instead dig deeper under the covers. They are told to get dressed and moving, but they drag their feet. People bicker. Some seem oblivious to passing time and the need to avoid being tardy to school and work.

Behavior problems have to be addressed, and I do not have the space here to do the topic justice. But we all know that when misbehavior occurs, we generally think that negative consequences have to be applied. The classically recommended consequence for bad behavior (not obeying a parent’s command to get a move on) is time-out. How in the world can a parent take the time to put a child in time-out when the whole problem in the morning is getting kids to school (and parents to work) on time? How, especially, when we are always told that we have to apply consequences immediately for them to be effective?

In my opinion, time-out is useful, and it just isn’t true that it has to be applied immediately to work. It is true that very young children cannot be expected to make the cognitive link between a behavior in the morning and a consequence applied sometime later in the day. But it is not true for school-age kids. They are perfectly capable of understanding that they are sitting in time-out at 4 p.m. for failing to get with the program that morning at 7:25.

First, we establish time-out as our cornerstone method of dealing with noncompliance. Pick up a book on the topic, such as Thomas Phelan’s “1-2-3 Magic” series. Then, we tell our children that they will go to time-out if they don’t get a move on in the morning. We give fair warning and then decide when time-out is earned. (For teenagers who have outgrown time-out, we decide on another consequence. Yanking screen time often works.)

In the morning, when our demands that Junior gets dressed are ignored, we say, “You’ll do time-out this afternoon when you get in from school.” The key then is for the parent to have the discipline, so to speak, to follow through. It is hard to do. We get home, it’s a nice afternoon, and we want to just forget the morning’s unpleasantness. That is understandable, but not helpful. Instead, we need to say, “Remember, you have to do your time-out for this morning.”