Mornings

Are mornings stressful at your house? They are, at mine. And honestly, I think I get off easy. Both parents are home to try to get kids out door, and one kid gets himself ready (largely because he is allowed to play on the iPad when he’s ready, which may not actually be the best arrangement ever, but that’s a different story. Literally. I talk about screens in another story.).

Serena, on the other hand, took a long, long time to settle into a morning routine. Or what seemed to me to be a long, long time. And I felt like I was trying to do some kind of elaborate dance, in which I simultaneously responded to requests for oatmeal/milk/spoons/etc., helped to keep her on track with respect to what she needed to do, modeled efficiency but not panicked rush (actively trying not to send the message that being late was The End of the World, but I’m quite sure that’s the message I sent anyway), and got myself out the door. I had my husband’s help; don’t get me wrong. But keeping Serena on track often required quite a lot of attention, and there were a few other things to attend to, too.

So, yes, eventually it occurred to me that as a Clever Behaviorist Mom, I should have some strategies to, ah, make mornings more efficient and pleasant.

We started with a list. Serena wasn’t really reading yet, but I figured she could learn to recognize a few key words and phrases, like “shoes and socks” and “breakfast”. We put checkboxes next to each item and laminated it so she could check things off and then wipe it clean for the next day. That worked sort of a little. She became so excited about the list that she would check things off before she did them, or spend a good two minutes admiring the list, deciding which shapes meant “done” and which meant “not yet done” (she took to using circles and things instead of checkmarks and, well, no check marks). Different colored dry-erase markers would get involved. And sometimes she couldn’t find the colors she wanted, so a search would ensue. Yep, the list had become its own distraction.

Then we sort of zoomed in on breakfast. Breakfast was taking a looooong time. Rob would get her her breakfast, and then while she and Ben were eating, I would come downstairs, and he would go upstairs. Ben would finish his breakfast and make his sandwich for his lunch. Serena would somehow still be looking at the same amount of oatmeal in her bowl. She would get distracted. By anything. Including just her imagination. I started saying, “Serena, please focus on your oatmeal,” over and over and over again. Note, not “hurry up” or “eat faster”. Just a gentle redirection. But eventually I got sick of hearing myself say it. So I asked her if we could make a catch-phrase. She chose “focus pocus”. We made a sign and hung it up opposite her seat at the table, and I started to say it, when necessary (usually I would get one syllable out before she would say, “Mo-ommm” and then get back to her breakfast. For 500 milliseconds).

We’d tell her she had 8 minutes left to brush her hair and teeth and put on her socks and shoes, and she would get panicky. We’d remind her this was plenty of time to do those things, she just had to finish her breakfast and do them, but she’d be in or near tears, so she had to spend a bit of time calming down first. And then she’d get distracted again.

So, we institute a reward. After all, what does her brother do, once he’s all ready? He plays on the ipad or throws a tennis ball against the wall (repeatedly, catching it in his glove in between… it’s a thing.). We only have one ipad, and Serena isn’t as into screens as her brother. So the plan is: if she gets ready in time for school, she can play. We even think of things in advance that she really wants to play before school.

It works for like two mornings. What went wrong? Oh, sort of everything. Some days, what she really wanted to play involved her brother, who wants to do what he wants to do (by himself). But mostly, I think, this had always been a potential reward (it lacked novelty), and it just wasn’t powerful enough.

So I’m wondering what’s going on. Are her frontal lobes just not quite ready for this level of executive function? But at this point, she’s six. And she seems to have a pretty good attention span, in other contexts. She can keep working on the same rainbow-loom penguin for an hour.

One day, we were going somewhere she wanted to go. I forget where it was. The zoo, Grandma’s house… something like that. And guess what. She got ready in a flash and was waiting for us. It’s not that rewards don’t work. It’s that they need to be the right rewards. Again. I should perhaps have learned this one by now.

Still, school is, well, required by law. And not quite as reinforcing as Grandma’s house. But you know what? As she grew to like (or at least tolerate) school more, or perhaps as her frontal lobes developed, it got better. Not entirely, but way better. I started to feel like I might leave the house with everything I needed for the day. One day. Maybe.