7 MORE Strategies for Easier, Calmer School Morning Routines

7 MORE Strategies for Easier, Calmer School Morning Routines

Sep 29, 2024

This is a follow-up to Your 4-Step Framework To Make School Mornings More Manageable. Set up your new morning routine there, then come back here to level up.

A cup of coffee in bed before the school morning routine starts.

Tired of school morning routine chaos? This post is for you

Once you have an outline of your new routine, and you give it a whirl, you might realize that with practice it solves all your problems and everything’s easy and nobody cries the rest of the school year.

Or, you might give yourself the grace of knowing sometimes things will still be hard. Because life.

Or, you might realize that you’re onto something and some things need to be tweaked — like giving yourself plenty of time for certain steps, giving yourself more wiggle room, giving your children more or less autonomy.

Here are 7 more approaches that can help further streamline your school mornings and make them feel easier and easier.

Here’s a good idea: Take what works, tweak what almost fits, and leave the rest.

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Now, back to school mornings. Let’s find your way to get along and get out the door.

(1) Shift time - what can you shift around to start the day off on the right foot?

Here’s the first step: What can be done the day before so that the next day feels better? Can you tweak the bedtime routine just a bit?

Knowing your own energy peaks and valleys lets you align certain tasks to certain parts of your day. I am not a “night before” kind of person because after dark my ability to function tanks. But I — and my kids — can do some things between getting home from the school day and cleaning up from dinner. Things like:

Picking out clothes, or even getting dressed in tomorrow’s clothes
Assembling a good breakfast so you can simply grab it or pour the milk in the morning
Making lunches, or parts of lunches
Filling water bottles
Gathering assignments, supplies, sports equipment, etc.

Take a look at your list of steps and determine which ones you want to happen in the morning and which ones could be time-shifted.

(2) Shift responsibility - what are some responsibility shifts that your whole family can get behind?

Raising younger kids is tricky because in some ways our expectations of them are too high (like expecting them to be able to regulate their emotions during a sibling battle) and in some ways too low (like doing things for them that they could do themselves).

It can help to make a “not my job list,” which, of course, is the inverse of your kid’s chore chart / star chart / routine chart / checklist. But come on, moms — why not start with what YOU do NOT want to do?

I do NOT want to fill their water bottles, so that’s on them.
I do NOT want to negotiate about pants, so we make sure he has clean pants to choose from, and he chooses his own outfit.
If you do NOT want to make their lunches or pack their lunch bag, empower them to do it or get school lunch.
If you do NOT want to be the time keeper, delegate that to alarms on a phone or smart speaker.

Still my job:

I do still like to give my kids loving time in the morning
I do still like to sit at the table with them while they eat breakfast, reading a short mystery story or jokes or listening to an audio book
I do still choose to pack their lunches
I do still choose to walk my 2nd grader and 4th grader to the bus even though they could manage it on their own

Take a look at the steps in your morning routine and determine which ones you want to continue doing, and which ones you want to hand over to your kids to learn to do for themselves.

(3) Batch for the week - some tasks can be batched for a smoother morning

Some things need to be done every morning (brush your teeth 😁), while other things can require less effort and time if you batch the whole week’s worth. This could look like:

Picking out a week’s worth of school clothes on Sunday after you fold laundry
Prepping breakfasts or lunches for the week, or at least planning to serve the same thing for lunch each day
Bake muffins or a snack cake that can be the daily breakfast or snack

What daily tasks would be easier or less time-consuming if you treated them like weekly tasks?

(4) Set up stations - a great way to streamline your school morning routine

Let’s stop it with the running around to find every thing for everything. (Full disclosure — still working on this in our house.)

Having things where I need them when I need them is my idea of a good time and sets me up for a great day. More to the point, when something isn’t where I expect it to be and we need to GO, I can get grizzly. We don’t want that. If you’re at all like me, here are a few stations you might want to maintain:

A grab-and-go snack station in the pantry and fridge
A lunch assembly station in your pantry and fridge
“Parking spaces” for things like bento boxes, lunch boxes, ice packs in the freezer. This is the classic “everything in its place” approach, and it WORKS.
Morning-grooming station for personal care with toothbrushes, toothpaste, hairbrushes, combs, barrettes, etc. (Ours is in the downstairs powder room — not so classy, but we are not a formal people)
A manageable get-out-the-door area. We follow the Ready Set Moms ENUF principle for coats, shoes, and accessories: Everything you need, Not too much, Useful, Fun. (This takes a weekly reset for us for some reason. God bless those of you who can keep it tight.)
Small but impactful tip: decide where to keep socks! Up in their dresser drawer like normal people or in a box near their shoes near the front door like us?
Backpack station. Decide the easiest place to store backpacks. Near coats and shoes for getting out the door, or near the kitchen for the afterschool unpacking and morning packing?
Sports/activity bins or bags. Keep these ready set.
And this really should be first on the list: A coffee station

What steps in your morning routine feel scattered? What stations could you create to pull it together?

Have the after-school routine support the morning routine

Life, it’s an endless cycle, right man? Let’s use that.

Here’s what our kids’ after-school routine looks like:

Place shoes by the door so they’ll be there in the morning
Empty backpacks
Does anything require student or parent attention? If so, do it now.
Empty lunch box and put it away
Return ice packs to freezer
Set bento box on counter; mom inspects and probably serves leftovers to you for snack
Refill water bottles and return to backpack
Hang up backpack
Wash hands and have a snack
“How was your day?”

What could you and the kids do immediately upon coming home from school/work to make the early mornings run more smoothly?

(5) Make it fun - a good morning routine always involves a little fun

One way to make mornings less dreadful is to simply decide that you want them to be otherwise. (Yeah, I can hear how annoying that suggestion sounds.) Here are some additional tips:

Cue up a theme song for certain steps. You can even set your alarm to play songs
Read to your kids or play an audiobook at the breakfast table. Some ones that have been great for us: Encyclopedia Brown short mysteries, Wild Robot, Dory Fantasmagory
Use a timer and make it a race — not against each other but against the clock
Have a morning fashion show with a catwalk and kids strutting their stuff to show off their outfits
Kick a ball or throw a frisbee on the way to the school bus
Ride bikes to school
Have a playlist or audiobook that you play only for the drive to school

How could mornings be more fun for you and your family? What’s worth trying?

(6) Make tweaks along the way - do what you need to do to start your day on a positive note

What is and isn’t “working.”
What would you like to be different?
What needs more time?
What order might need to change?

Here’s a small tweak we’ve made for school mornings and wake-up times this year, and I’m LOVING it.

It used to be I’d go wake up my daughter, I’d give her love and attention, and I’d proceed to pressure her to get out of bed. It would result in me heading downstairs without her like I said I would, and her tearing up and starting the day so mad.

The tweak for a good start? Her alarm clock goes off 10 minutes before I come to her room. So she gets to rise to the surface on her own, without me needing to do the pressure campaign. I do still give her love and attention. But in terms of getting out of bed, she’s parenting herself now.

Check in with yourself. What’s going well and what could use some adjustments?

(7) Take it easy on yourself, and your kids - chaotic mornings are inevitable!

Remember — your morning routine, or any routine, is there to support you. It’s meant to decrease pressure, not add to it. You don’t need to adhere to it perfectly for it to be helpful.

By decreasing decisions, you decrease decision-fatigue.

As the ideas you choose become habits, things will get easier, and you will feel lighter.

And remember, some mornings are just rough. Whether it’s stress at work or school, an unresolved issue with a friend, not getting enough sleep, or an incoming cold that hasn’t quite made itself known yet — there are loads of reasons any given morning will go sideways.

And when it does, the best you can do is notice it, and shake it off. Small steps are still steps!

And there’s always tomorrow.