How To Destress Your Mornings With Kids

I’m so excited to feature Sierra, a content creator for The Zebra. It is a site that compares auto insurance quotes for users! She wrote this article on how to destress your mornings with kids by using routines.

I’m all about routines over here. Because of them, I’m thankful we’re even to the point where my kids need basically ZERO involvement from me in the morning. At only ages 7 and 10, they wake themselves up, make and eat breakfast, pack lunches, brush teeth, do hair, pack backpacks and bike themselves a mile to school. These tips below are a great start to helping your kids become self-sufficient. In turn, there is no stress in the morning!

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No one wants to begin the morning in a high-spirited argument over the need to brush your teeth or eat breakfast. Clashing on how things run in the morning is truly the worst. Everyone can be groggy and grumpy when they should be getting geared up. What should be a good time to bond with your child, for many of us, can become a huge battle. That’s why you need to destress your mornings with kids.

For many parents during the week, that brief time in the morning is the only chance they get to interact with their children before dinner. Of course, we would all love to fill that time with positive support instead of yelling about where a shoe may have gone.

There’s no doubt that making that time more cooperative, instead of combative, can hugely alter a parent-child relationship. 

Problems in the morning usually stem from a lack of preparedness and a difficulty in keeping up with very specific duties that must be accomplished before going to school. By codifying the actions you and your children take (and doing as much as you can beforehand) it is possible to recraft the morning into the engaging and beneficial time that it should be.  

It Starts With The Night Before

The best way to have a more organized morning is to strategize the previous evening. Every puzzle piece you put into place the night before is something that you won’t have to think about the next day.

Discuss Plans At Dinner 

There are many proven positive effects of sitting down to a family dinner.  Research has shown that families that sit down to dinner have children with higher self-esteem, improved academic performance, and even lower obesity rates. 

Another benefit that studies may have not covered is one that helps you destress your mornings with kids. When you have a chance to sit down as a family, it is a great time to discuss the plan for the following day in detail. Not only will this give you a strategy for setting up for tomorrow, including thinking of things like instruments that need to be packed away or assignments that are due, but it also may have your child opening up to you about things in school that you might otherwise have missed. 

For many children, putting a schedule on a board helps them get centered for the day ahead. If you have space, get a large chalkboard or paint a chalkboard wall as a great place to keep a daily schedule to refer to after dinner. 

Prep Lunches 

If you want the morning to run more smoothly, part of your routine for the evening should be cleaning up, doing dishes and making lunches. Give your children responsibility over their lunches as soon as is possible to give them some empowerment on what they are eating. 

Note from Adriane: By signing up for my newsletter, you will receive a free Lunchbox List of Food Ideas so your kids can pack their own lunches! My kids started in First Grade!

If you have young children, they may feel more like a hindrance than a help with getting things ready. Even if this is the case, they will benefit more from being part of this task than if you did it for them. This is how kids learn! 

A great tip that works well is to have your child pick what he would like to pack and also decided how he wants you to help. You can make the sandwich, but have him or her bag it up and place it in the lunch box. Using Bentgo-like lunch containers make it even easier to split up the work because you can do one of the sections and your child do the other two. 

Older kids can be given the chore of crafting their own lunches as part of their evening work. And remember, if they don’t pack what you like, that’s THEIR choice! Make sure you provide healthy options or set limits on what is and isn’t allowed. 

Read Next: An Easy Way for Kids to Pack School Lunch 

Pull Out Clothes

With many children, waiting for them to get “acceptable” clothes on is a huge chunk of the morning wasted. Whether it’s a favorite shirt or the right pants, many kids will float back and forth before making their decisions (leaving you with a pile of clean clothes all over their room). Instead of putting all that on your morning you can get some of this out of the way in the night before.

For those with younger children, help them pick out clothes during pajama time. This also allows you to avoid that awful moment when your child realizes that the shirt they wanted to wear is dirty or currently in the wash. If your child also requires uniforms or gym clothes to be ready, you can make sure these are ready and even put a bag in the car rather than waiting until the last minute. 

For many of us, shoes are an additional issue. Have your kids put shoes in the same place every day so you don’t have to endure a yelling battle over lost shoes.

Focus on Sleep

The National Sleep Foundation says that children should get about 10 hours of sleep per night to foster the best brain development. 

Thinking back from the time your child needs to get up to get to school on time means that if she has a 6:30am alarm, she should be getting to sleep around 8:30pm. This is a struggle for any parent, but doing what we can to get children off to bed means creating beneficial evening habits. 

It’s best to shut the screens off at least an hour before they hit the pillow because the harsh blue light suppresses the melatonin needed to get quality rest. Take that time to read to little children and encourage teens to grab a book rather than sit on their ipads. At the same time, you can start lowering lights to stimulate melatonin. 

If your children have trouble sleeping, consider creating the best nighttime environment that is conducive to rest. 

These work great: 

• Blackout curtains create darkness signaling to the brain that it’s time to sleep. 
• Some sounds can be very soothing and the addition of a whirring fan, or adding a white or pink noise machine, to their nighttime routine can help them calm down enough to fall asleep.
• Temperature control is important. Keep it as comfortably cool as you can in your child’s room. 
• Use a diffuser or other method to promote fragrances that help with sleep. 

A good night of sleep can easily destress your mornings with kids.

5 Ways to Have a Successful Morning With No Yelling

When everyone gets up, having a routine to reference will make everything run more smoothly. 

Start With Time For You

If you can, try to rise about 15 minutes or so before everyone else and take some time to breathe.

Yoga or some stretching exercises can help center you before your day begins, but it can be just as helpful and grounding to sit with a cup of coffee for a moment before the morning fun. 

Related: Transform Your Morning Routine to be a Productive and Happy Mom

Make Wake Up Time Calming

Try to leave enough time in the morning to make wake-ups as gentle as possible. With younger children, having time to cuddle a bit makes for a much nicer morning. For older kids, raising the lights slowly, maybe with some soothing music accompanying, puts less of a shock on wake-up time. 

Or better yet, let them choose their own alarm clock and give them the responsibility of getting up completely on their own! 

Create A Morning Routine

Put together an easy-to-follow plan of how things go. This will is a surefire destress your mornings with kids. Starting with your child making the bed is a good way to set the tone for the morning ahead.

Then keep things in an established order: getting dressed, eating breakfast, brushing teeth, finding shoes, and getting last minute things ready for school all should be followed in the same order every day. This way there is never any confusion and it sets up good and clear habits.

To help your family get out the door, try using a morning or evening checklist from The Zebra so everyone leaves the house on time and safely. Kids can check off their routine and you can even offer special points or incentives to keep them getting all of their checks.

Read Next: 6 Steps to Master a School Morning Routine for Kids (on The Zebra’s website)

Load Up On Protein

They say breakfast is the most important meal of the day, but how often do you go with only a bowl of cereal?

While grains are great, trying to get kids in the habit of having protein at breakfast will pay off in the long run. Higher protein foods like eggs and yogurt are good for keeping kids focused and will keep them fuller longer. 

Adding fruits and vegetables and limiting sugar is a good plan as well. It’s also crucial to be hydrated in the morning.

Expect the Unexpected

With kids, of course, you have to realize that all of your carefully laid plans can change in an instant. The best thing you can do to destress your mornings with kids is to be flexible when things don’t go exactly as you anticipate. 

Giving yourself the time, and preparing in advance will mean you have the latitude to take on anything that comes up. 

Being prepared will turn your mornings into a better time for bonding with your kids. It may just mean changing the way you think of the evening and turning it into a time for preparations for tomorrow. 

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AUTHOR BIO: 

Sierra Skelly is a content creator for The Zebra who develops helpful and compelling stories. Her passion for digital marketing and creative writing has led her to cover unique topics ranging from business to lifestyle. She calls San Diego, CA home and enjoys crafting, decorating and traveling in her spare time.