Organizing Your Kids - Part 2

As the mom of two ADHD kids, I've had to learn to think on my feet when it comes to getting them moving in the morning. When Matt was younger, mornings used to be my daily nightmare. It was mostly about herding him around, yelling at him, and raising my blood pressure thinking he was going to be late for school every single day. Needless to say, it caused both of us to start our day off on totally the wrong foot.

After some trial and error and reading a number of good books, I decided to revamp our whole morning routine. It worked wonders with Matt and I have been able to carry that same strategy along with Blake. Now our mornings are usually pretty great - well, probably 90% of the time and that ain't too bad!

Here are some of the fixes I put in place.

- Minimize distractions. No cartoons, video games, or even radio, ever. ADHD kids just cannot split their focus between two different activities and really neither can I. Whenever the TV is on, it's like a magnet and it draws everyone in the house right to it, even if there's nothing interesting on. If I find him drawn to books or toys in his room, I will even have him get dressed in a bathroom or the laundry room where there aren't any distractions clamoring for his attention.
- Set a wake up time and stick to it. This just makes it easier on your body if it knows you have to get up at a specific time. For Blake it is 6:50 (his choice). Since he goes to bed at 9:00 most nights, that gives him enough sleep to function and he likes getting up that early on weekends to watch cartoons. In fact, he insists on it when I would prefer to have him sleep in a bit later, but he's one of those morning kids.
- This also makes it easy to set benchmark times. For instance, they should be dressed by ___ time, lunch made by ___ time, and ready to go out the door by ___ time. Sometimes it helps to have an extra alarm clock in the kitchen to give them a warning 20-30 minutes before they have to leave. Then they know if they are running behind. (I do this for myself sometimes too!)
- Make kids responsible for getting themselves up in the morning. If you make yourself responsible for waking them up, then you get into the "sneaking back into bed" game and that is just no fun. It just turns into a power struggle and a frustration. Even a six year old can work an alarm clock and they like the feeling of responsibility it gives them.
- If you have a kid who is hard to wake up, get an alarm clock with a very loud alarm and put it across the room from him. If nothing else, "the call of nature" should get to him once he is up and moving around. That's why you put the alarm clear across the room. (For Matt, I got him a "Clocky" which is an alarm clock on wheels. If he doesn't shut it off, it jumps off his dresser and runs around the room beeping like mad - drives the cats absolutely crazy!)
- As a last resort, use a squirt gun. He might get mad, but he will realize you mean business about getting his butt out of bed in the morning. Or if you don't want to use the tough love approach, offer hot chocolate or some other treat on the mornings he is successful in getting himself up at the appointed time. It may take a while, but it's important that kids learn to take responsibility for themselves.
- Get your morning routine set in stone. That is the only way these kids can remember to do everything they need to do is if they do exactly the same things every morning in exactly the same order. Here is our routine:
- Get up 6:50
- Make bed
- Get dressed
- Brush teeth and comb hair (All by 7:15)
- Make lunch
- Get backpack ready - by 7:30
- Eat breakfast
- Then there is usually some extra time to finish up homework, do extra reading, practice the piano, or even watch a little TV (as a special treat) before the carpool comes to pick him up.

Yes, I can hear you now, he's brushing his teeth first and then eating his breakfast, instead of vice versa. However, having the breakfast last on the list is absolutely the KEY to the whole thing. That way if he does have a rough morning, I can toss him a piece of toast and shoo him out the door. Obviously, I'm not going to make him go hungry, but if he's a little bit hungry by lunchtime, that's probably a good motivator for him to be better organized the next day.

This way, he suffers for his lack of focus and not me, because I'm not frantically running around trying to find shoes and backpacks and gloves at the last minute. Instead, he's the crazy guy running around trying to grab a bite to eat with the pressure of the carpool honking in the driveway. That's a very good natural consequence and it works very well as a motivator.