Managing Morning Mayhem

Can you really get your child to get out of the house in the morning without repeating yourself 10 times and maybe losing it? You're trying to leave home and you are so frustrated because your child is on a go-slow. They refuse to eat breakfast, they run off in search of a toy that you haven't seen in weeks, and the clock is ticking. You find that unless you wind up shouting and nagging, they just don't seem to listen, and you're wondering if there's a better way. I know that as a parent, you want to have clear boundaries and be caring and compassionate, right? I'm Camilla McGill, a parenting coach with years of experience, and I'm a mom of 4. I'm excited to give you the principles, tools, and inspiration you need to raise amazing kids. Welcome to Raising Kids with Love and Boundaries. After working with thousands of parents over the past 20+ years, I've worked out key steps to put in place to make sure that you can get out of the house with your kids on time, feeling calm and happy. Without these steps, you'll no doubt find nothing changes. You'll wind up starting your working day feeling stressed and guilty that you screamed and threatened and then dropped them at school. So let's make sure that this doesn't happen to you again, because who wants to wake up tomorrow and do the same thing all over again? Oh, and what you are going to learn won't just help you in the morning. Imagine going out for a pizza and actually enjoying it. So listen on, and I'm going to walk you through my great method used here for, for managing morning mayhem. So let's dive in. Now, this is the exact same problem that Maddie came to me for and asking for my help. Maddie is a teacher and she has to get to work on time as well as getting her two boys, George and Freddie, to school. She used to get up, go into the boys' room to find them chasing each other wildly and completely ignoring her request to take off their pajamas. Does anybody else have this happen? Like so many parents, Maddie's patience would rapidly fail and she'd start to ramp it up. Hurry up, come on, we're going to be late. You're so selfish, I need to get to work. Right, that's it, no special treat for you after school. Stuff like that. Then she'd look at her watch with time ticking by, and boom, just get your pajamas off now! Maybe the yank of an arm of a wriggling toddler, and she tried to wrestle them into their clothes. The result? The boys would shout at her, cry, or simply run off again. And Maddie is left feeling powerless. It's crazy, isn't it? Before we had kids, did we ever imagine that we could get so furious with them? So we're talking about managing morning mayhem, and step 1 of us using the GREAT method is called, is G, get connected. Before any request is made, engage and connect with your child. Some examples of this in the morning might be to physically connect, get into bed with them, have a 2-minute snuggle, engage with something they're playing or looking at. I love how you concentrate on playing with your dolls. Note, do not try to connect if they're watching a screen. So you might tell them something about them that you love. You'll probably think that that takes too long, but the reality is A small amount of time to connect with our kids really does pay off because kids who feel connected with us want to please us. So that was step 1, G, get connected. Now we're talking about managing morning mayhem without going completely nuts. And here's step 2, R, respect and manage their, respect their feelings and manage their resistance. The fact that kids are resistant shows us that they're feeling something, and we need to think what that is. This was something that hadn't occurred to Maddie, who was struggling to get her boys out the door. It made a really big difference to how they began to cooperate. So with respecting the feeling, we might say something like, huh, it feels so annoying to go to school, doesn't it? Maybe you're worried that you'll miss out on something that we want you to do at home when you go to school. I bet it feels so cozy at home. You don't want to leave. You'd be as amazed as Maddie was how resistance can be lowered when kids' feelings are respected and understood. Try this. I think it will make a really big difference. Managing morning mayhem. Step 3 of the GREAT method. E, expectations. We assume that kids know what's coming. I mean, it's logical as we do the same thing every day, right? Okay, news broadcast: toddlers and young kids live in the moment. They're thinking about their game, not about the time it's going to take to eat breakfast and get to school and allow you to get to work on time. Now, ideally, we would have gone over this, the whole process, the night before, but we still need to manage their expectations again in the morning. After our snuggle, it's going to be time to take off our PJs. And get your clothes on. After getting your clothes on, we're going to go downstairs for breakfast. When you finish, finish breakfast, we brush our teeth. Always alerting them to what's coming up, not all in one go, but one step at a time. Give me a like and hit follow if this has been helpful so far. But speaking of what's coming up, stay listening because we've got the two final steps and you don't want to miss them. So managing morning mayhem, step 4A, ask a question. We need to jump really quickly to ask our kids questions. What needs to happen next? Then what's going to happen after that? What day is it today? How fast can you put your clothes on? As well as managing their expectations, we also need to spend a lot of time asking and clarifying. Why do we ask a question? Because if we, we need to establish that they've understood and we've made our instruction clear enough, and then when they give a reply, that will also get some buy-in. So here is step 5 for managing morning mayhem. T of the GREAT method. T, tiny steps. We need to focus on the tiny steps of progress. Ha! You've got one sock on. Excellent. Normally we would say, "Is that all you've done? We're going to be late." We might say, "Oh, you've taken one bite of toast. Soon you'll have the whole thing finished." Now you're going to tell me that you simply can't do that. You get so annoyed when they go at the pace of a snail. And I'm here to tell you, you will be amazed how much faster things go when you slow down to notice. Isn't it easy to not focus on the praise and only focus on what hasn't been done? So remember, hit follow and subscribe if you'd like to see more of this, but stay listening because coming up, I'm going to talk over how you can use the GREAT method to go out to pizza and feel proud of your kids. So firstly, I really hope that was helpful. And can you see that you could get them cooperating better over getting dressed using the GREAT method? So here's great news. This is all covered in my free guide, How to Get Your Kids to Listen Without Ever Needing to Nag, Shout, or Threaten. In it, I teach the GREAT method, which is what we just went over. So to grab your free guide, go to myparentingsolutions.com/justlisten. myparentingsolutions.com/justlisten. Now I wanna talk about how to take your kids out to eat, and maybe last time it was hellish. They wouldn't sit at the table, they wouldn't touch their food, you wound up being furious. So I'd like you to try this again, but use the GREAT method to prepare your kids in advance of the event. Parents tell me it's a total game changer. Now there's more that I can't cover in this episode, but I hope that you're going to tune in next time. And remember, to get this GREAT method, go to myparentingsolutions.com/great. Www.annemariearthur.com/justlisten. I'll also drop this below in my show notes. Thank you so much for joining me today and tune in for more.