Savvy Tips to Get out the Door (for School or Daycare)
With Brooklyn gearing up for back-to-school, now is the perfect time to think about your family’s routines and schedules. Switching from summer to the fall can be super stressful, but you can smooth the ride with just a little bit of planning.
Focusing your efforts on tweaking two main areas – the morning and the evening – will reframe your family’s entire day.
Morning Routines: The best way to get yourself and your brood out the door on time is to have a consistent morning plan!
Family members’ needs are different – mom may need a cup of coffee, dad might need an extra 20 winks, etc., but everyone still needs to get dressed, fed and out the door with everything they need. Don’t overdo it at the expense of the essentials. Consider it an added bonus if you’ve thrown in a load of laundry or toss something in the crock pot!
Probably the best way to ensure that routines happen are by making checklists for each person of the essentials, the temporaries and the would-be-nice’s. If your kids are in Pre-K or older, many will be able to understand the individual steps to get to your end goal of leaving the house by a certain time, if you break it down for them.
Decide how specific you want to make your checklist. Some families write “eat breakfast”; some add “clear your bowl and put it into sink”. However you spell it out, the result is that your kids now know what they need to accomplish. If you make the effort and reinforce it, soon enough the process will become ingrained and they will enforce it themselves. You could use stickers or add a small prize at the end of the week –like picking the family night movie – to make following the checklist more enticing.
Want a template? Priceless Parenting has a good one you can download for free.
Or help your kids create their own – they’ll be that much more invested in the process!
Here’s what my kids’ morning routine looks like (ages 3 and 4.5):
- Rise and shine
- Get dressed
- Take vitamins
- Eat breakfast
- Wash face and hands
- Brush and floss teeth
- Brush hair
- Get lunchbox from fridge
- Put on shoes, helmet & backpack
- Scoot out the door!
We laminate ours – the morning routine goes on one side and evening on the other – and put it on a clipboard, one per kid.
Especially in the morning do your best to build in a small buffer. That way when your son needs to change his clothes or your daughter has a meltdown, you can still get out the door on time.
Evening Routines: this is where the gold is. Good evening habits tonight simplify and de-stress your tomorrow. There are common tasks, but every family is different. Think about what you (and your kids!) can do the night before to make mornings fly. (This is usually separate from children’s bedtime routine, but it doesn’t have to be.)
Some common evening checklist items – put them and others on auto-pilot!
- Pack all diaper bags, purses and/or backpacks
- Place everyone’s keys and wallets in their ‘homes’
- Make and pack snacks and lunches
- Get a handle on dinner plans for the following night (take food out to defrost?)
- Set the coffee maker or hot water pot
- Put away toys and books
- Lay out tomorrow’s clothes and shoes (yours, but especially your children’s)
- Review tomorrow’s schedule
- Charge all cell phones, music devices and/or laptops
As you can see, the nighttime routine is more complicated, and depending on the age of your children they likely can’t do it all themselves. As they grow, their tasks should increase, so keep adapting your routine to their new abilities.
When you repeat these things daily, not only do you give kids the security of knowing what to expect, but solid routines build a sense of responsibility and teach good organizational habits. And that kind of learning is priceless!
******Amanda Wiss, Founder of Urban Clarity, is a professional organizer and mom of two toddlers. Featured in the Wall Street Journal, Amanda helps families who are feeling overwhelmed simplify their space and set up systems to decrease the chaos. To check out Amanda’s resource listing on the blog and reviews of her services, click here.