Your 4-Step Framework To Make School Mornings More Manageable

Your 4-Step Framework To Make School Mornings More Manageable

Sep 19, 2024

If school mornings feel like a scramble, a rush, or a rage fest, we have some work to do. And it’s important we slow down and look at this so we can make time work better for us and our kids, so that you can come up with a new routine, or at least a new way of doing things.

Your morning does not have to be the most stressful part of your day. White knuckling and barreling through school mornings is NOT a recipe for peace, inside or out. It’s a recipe for tantrums. (And I’m not just talking about the kids 😏)

Don’t miss the Mom Wins at the bottom of this post!

Little boy reaching to turn his alarm clock off for school.

How To Make School Mornings Easier

When it comes to school morning routines, one size fits one

Mom and daughter brushing teeth and getting ready for school.

As always in Ready Set Moms, I’m not going to tell you how I do it and tell you to go do it my way. That would be gross. I’m not going to give you a hard time!

What I am going to do is guide you to think through what will work for you.

For example, last week, I went for an early morning walk with my friend and neighbor. Her kids were already back to school, mine weren’t yet. I asked her if her husband was taking care of her kids’ morning routine.

Nope. She shared that her kids, grades 1 and 4, do their own morning routine. The fourth grader makes their lunches for the next day, they get themselves up and dressed in their own outfit, eat breakfast and brush teeth, the whole thing. Then they get quality connection time with Mom on the 20-minute drive to school.

This is SO different from how things run in our family, where we have cuddling and reading and I do most things for them or they do things only with my prompting.

Hearing my neighbor’s story made me realize our kids could be a lot more independent (and made me wonder if we have a co-dependent situation up here).

But the fact is, her entire family IS more independent. It suits their natures. They prefer it that way.

And I prefer nurturing and connecting with my kids first thing in the morning.

I love hearing about how other families do things, not to compare for the sake of judgment of myself or them, but for a new perspective and a good idea or two, take ‘em or leave ‘em.

When planning school mornings, think about time as dashes and dots

Mom kissing her daughter's forehead while packing her school lunch.

When I worked at an advertising agency, one of my responsibilities was making sure the team had enough time to meet the deadlines. Because deadlines are pretty meaningless without considering the extra time it takes to get the work done well.

That’s when I started thinking about time in terms of dots and dashes.

A dot is a point in time, the time your plane is scheduled to take off
A dash is how long it takes to get from point to point, like needing 45 minutes to get to the airport

So it’s like this:

When you know all the steps in the process
And put them in a reasonable order
And you have a sense of how long each step takes
You can string the dots and dashes together and voila, an achievable timeline

We can do this for our school-morning routines, too.

I know this isn’t revolutionary, but applying dots-and-dashes thinking to managing a household has a few benefits:

We can give ourselves the actual time it takes to do things, because it reveals that the things we do as mothers take time. Nothing just happens. We have to make them happen.
We can give ourselves more credit.
We can give ourselves more grace.

Psst! Need helping getting on top of things in your mom-life? Could you use a little less stress?

Mom-Life Coaching — the support you never knew you needed. Erika Friday.

Mom-life coaching is DESIGNED for times like these!

We can look at your priorities, logistics, Google calendar, your never-ending to do list. We can develop visual schedules or routines or structure for you and your family with some simple tips that are easy to implement.

I PROMISE you this support is designed to make things feel more doable, NOT simply make you an organized weekly planner that’s just as hard to follow through on.

Our work together can be as tactical as figuring out your carpool schedule and as big-picture as declaring what’s important to you and making time for that. We will find your unique way to make time work for you, rather than leave you panicking because you never have enough of it.

I recommend a 3-pack minimum to do this work well.

Send an email to [email protected] with “coaching” in the subject line, and I’ll send you a link to book! Happy to answer any questions.

Here's your 4-step framework to make school mornings manageable for the entire week

Step 1 - Determine the steps

Kids washing their hands before school.

Let’s get granular and write down every step in the morning routine. Once it becomes ACTUALLY routine, you won’t need to think about them. Good habits sustain themselves.

The first and last items will be dots (for example, getting out of bed >> arriving at school). The rest will be dashes

Here are ours:

I get out of bed (with hopefully enough sleep for the day ahead!)
I get dressed & brush my teeth
I pack lunches while the coffee brews
I enjoy my coffee while playing Wordle & listening to the news
Kids get out of bed
Kids get dressed in school clothes
Family eats breakfast together
Kids brush teeth and hair
Kids pack backpacks with school supplies and necessities
We gear-up (socks, shoes, jackets)
We head out the door for the school bus
They get on the bus

What else is included in your morning routine? Any chores? Taking care of pets? Write your own list.

Step 2 - Get the steps in a logistically logical order... morning madness no more!

A mom and her son proud that they are done getting ready for the school day!

A tip I swear by — even if we don’t do it perfectly every day — is to keep traffic flowing from the beds to the front door.

Here’s how this looks in our two-story house:

When I get up I get dressed. While I’d prefer to lounge in my PJs while I enjoy my coffee, I’ve learned that getting dressed before I leave the bedroom minimizes my back and forth and makes me more available to my kids when they get out of bed.

My daughter gets dressed in her bedroom while I read to her from our favorite series. We get to enjoy that time together, and when she comes downstairs that step is done. No need to run back up for a sweatshirt.

(Last year she brought her clothes downstairs and got dressed after breakfast.)

My son sleeps in tomorrow’s clothes. What works for him works for me.

Our kids brush their teeth in the downstairs powder room as one of their last steps. My sister’s kids brush their teeth before coming down to breakfast.

There will be no going back upstairs!

What would forward motion look like in your house? How can you make that happen?

Step 3 - Determine how long each step takes in the school morning routine -- the length of the dashes

A mom and daughter packing lunch for school.

I’m VERY uncomfortable estimating how long something will take. Kids (older kids and younger kids!) are unpredictable, things come up, some of us (me and my daughter included) are prone to distraction, I’m often not even aware of the passing of time, and so on.

So when I feel that discomfort, I coach myself to get curious.

A low-stakes way to do that is to audit one tiny thing at a time.

Let’s say one of the dashes in the morning routine is “gearing up,” as in, putting on socks, shoes, jackets, backpacks, go. How long would that take for each family member? 1 minute? 5 minutes? Estimate and set a stopwatch to see how close your estimate is to (today’s) reality.

Get the data and stay curious: What factors were in play? Were the shoes where they’re supposed to be, or were they left somewhere? Were the kids messing around or focused?

My top tip: Estimate how long each step will take and set aside plenty of time. Conduct time studies if helpful.

Step 4 - Give yourself the time it takes to do the steps and say goodbye to morning stress

Mom relaxing in the morning after school drop off.

Now that you know the steps, you have them in a reasonable order, and you have a sense of how long they take, you can figure out when each step needs to happen.

Start with the last step (something like getting the kids on the school bus) and work all the way back to when you will be getting out of bed.

Overthinking? Maybe.

Belabored? Maybe.

But on a positive note, I’d much rather take the time to think these things through so every morning from here on out can be easier. No more morning rush. Worth it to me, and beneficial for my mental health.

Why be frazzled and scrambled when you could make small changes that make things feel easeful and capable? I’ll take the good mood to start off my morning, please!

Mom-Win: Solve your school mornings with a stress-free morning routine

Here’s how to make the concept of dashes and dots work for you as you design your family’s morning routine to get off to a good start:

Jot down each step of the morning routine on a sticky note — these are the dashes. Small steps are still steps!
Arrange the sticky notes in the order that makes the most sense — keeping forward progress in mind
Estimate how much time each step will take, and write that on the notes — you can always update these later
Note the actual time of the last point in the morning routine — this will be something like catching the school bus or your child walking into school when the bell rings
Work backward from that last point, giving each step the time you estimated
Maybe you need this last step, maybe you don’t: Set an alarm clock and label alarms for when each step should BEGIN. (NOT, when the step should be completed.) The alarms mean you no longer need to be the timekeeper. You can shift that responsibility to your phone or smart speaker. This is just one more way to allow yourself to be in the moment with your family.

Here’s hoping your prep for the school day is much easier going forward!