How to manage mornings with ADHD DC, it’s breaking me!

[Catingle]

DS is 10 and has inattentive ADHD..

Getting ready for school in the morning is just such hard work. If I leave him on his own he gets distracted and it frequently takes 45mins just for him to put his clothes on.

Urgency seems to be the only thing that motivates him and I don’t like to shout but it often seems the only thing that gets through to him as he just has his head in the clouds.

I have ADHD myself and know how hard it is but trying to have enough executive function for two (and another more NT DC) is exhausting me every morning.

DS is going to secondary in September which is super strict (detention for forgetting a pencil kind of thing) and I don’t know how we’re going to cope.

How can we make this easier?

Things that might help:

buy a box of 100 pencils and a box of 100 pens and about ten clear pencil cases from Amazon. Make up several ready to go cases so that when he loses one you have another and another and another

buy a label maker and label everything that he has that might go into school. Sew nametapes into all his uniform and also write his name on with sharpies.

go to the second hand uniform sale and buy lots of spares of everything.

buy a load of plastic folders. One per subject plus one for homework. All books go into the plastic folders and all homework goes into the homework folder. You will need to check these every day for a few months.

laminate his timetable when you get it and put it on the back of his phone, on his key ring, in each plastic pencil case and anywhere else you can think of.

Also:

buy water bottles and ready to eat breakfast bars.
this way if he misses breakfast he can drink water and eat a bar on the way to school (will he need to bus or will he walk/cycle?)

put uniform in his wardrobe in a whole set on a Sunday night so he has five whole sets just hanging there and only needs to get it out.

Haha I’ve already bulk purchased all the stationary on Amazon. Currently debating how many calculators to invest in!

We already have portable breakfasts (toast folded up as a sandwich) as he often runs out of time to eat at home.

And I currently lay out all his clothes for him in the morning in the order he needs to put them on.

And it is STILL a daily trial!

lol sounds like you know most of the tricks.

calculators - lots of people sell them off on eBay after exams cheap. You generally only need them for maths and science so if his maths teacher and science teacher are happy to let him leave one in the classroom (most teachers have some kind of crate system for books and he could leave it there) you can get away with two.

a lot of kids like to destroy them as a fiddle thing which can get expensive.

If he needs deadlines, set timers. Use a stopwatch. Turn it into a game. See how much he can get done in 5 minutes. Actually start with one minute. Don't make the intervals too long or he will lose focus long before the buzzer goes.

Ds had a dozen phone alarms to prompt him in early secondary mornings and after school. The after school ones were things like PE kit in wash basket (he managed his own washing later ) and one for packing Food Tech ingredients the day before FT.

IME you have to let them fail a bit and experience the natural/real world consequence - it's horrible but the problem is if you do it all for them forever and then suddenly let it drop they don't develop the coping mechanisms and skills on their own.

That is not to say that you shouldn't support at all. Sometimes it's not the right time to give them the space to fail, because that would counteract progress with something else, like school anxiety for example.

Is he on medication? For me personally (I also have ADHD) mornings stopped being such a massive nightmare once I found the right medication. Although I only take it when I wake up it seems that either it reduces general life exhaustion so I'm sleeping better, or there is enough left in my system from the previous day that I can actually wake up in a fairly normal time frame rather than being a total zombie until about 10am regardless of how much sleep I'd had or continually falling back to sleep until the afternoon if uninterrupted. I seem to really struggle to get going in the mornings naturally, and DS1 does as well.

Shouting/urgency tends to work because it "wakes up" the central nervous system which seems a bit slow to come online in the mornings. You/he could look for and experiment with other ideas for how to achieve that. For example, DS2 (nearly 7) is in OT at the moment and they have looked at energy levels with him in terms of self regulation. His nervous system gets really easily activated which results in aggression because it's like he's perceiving everything as an emergency which needs the strongest possible response right now, it's like he has too much urgency. So for him we are looking at calming activities to signal to his CNS that there is in fact not an emergency, it's just your brother being annoying (or whatever). But on the back of that sheet there are suggestions for how to wake up or activate this urgency/alertness level, and it's things like bright lights, upbeat music, sense of urgency, movement, cold water, enthusiasm from the adults' voice/body language (You know... all the things you just LOVE to do early in the morning 😱)

Anyway... not really my preferred solution. But it might be something you can do in a more gentle way. What kinds of things get him all enthusiastic and wired up? Could you incorporate those into the morning routine? The problem of course is finding something stimulating enough to engage him but that he won't get distracted with.

Simulating the urgency but handing it over to him might be a way to do it for example setting multiple alarms or reminders, esp on some kind of voice assistant like Google/Alexa, reminding him of what stage he should be in. Sort of mini-deadlines for each subtask, like OK it's 7:00, the joke/fact of the day is X (I'm sure this is a thing you can set those assistants to do), time to get wiggling your toes and stretch under the duvet, the weather is XYZ.

Now it's 7:15, you should be heading into the bathroom to brush your teeth/starting to get dressed. If you can get downstairs and dressed before 7:20 you can get 5 points (maybe this could also be randomised).

Tying routine tasks to a reward that can build up over time can help too especially if there's something he really wants.

My son is younger - 8 - but we have the same challenges.

Based on a friends recommendation we tried a bath in the morning. It feels counterproductive but it actually works really well - I think because it helps him regulate so he can focus more on dressing.

And it breaks the dressing into two stages - get naked for bath (easier to do because not resisting school at this point) and put on clothes (feels more obvious because already naked).

We had this. I used all the tricks listed above, which could have been written by me!
I had only three morning phrases.
'Get up!'
'Time to go!'
'Phone, keys, wallet!'
Breakfast was portable in the car.
We copied his locker key probably 50 times over the years and he secreted them around the school for emergencies.
On the way to and from school, we listened to whatever English literature book he was meant to be reading at the time.
He was always in detention though for all the usual ADHD stuff. He loved that 'little prison'. Really he did. They had the pastoral care support staff in there and he's still in touch with them now.
Don't forget though, as you say urgency is a driver, so let it get urgent. And these people are often brilliant off the cuff. DS did really well academically, much to everyone's annoyance and surprise.

He hasn’t got a phone yet snd we are just debating what to get him (worried about him having a lot of online access because he struggles with screen time regulation) but one with a good system for reminders sounds like it should be top of my list

I think what I need is better ways to communicate with him. I really try not to put him under negative pressure - the temptation to shout «oh my god how the hell are you still standing round in your pants?!” Is huge so I try to keep it positive - “hey DS how are you getting on?”. But he seems to rely on my getting to the point of having to start yelling “I need you downstairs NOW” for anything real action to kick in. I still try not to be critical when shouting (more channelling army drill sergeant) but I hate every day starting with all this stress. If nothing else it is mentally exhausting for me!

Interesting idea but he HATES baths (or washing in general!)

Alexa is better for alarms than a phone. A phone is an infinite time wasting device in the hands of someone with adhd.

Breakfast in pj’s or underwear, get dressed downstairs. If I lost ds back to his bedroom, I had no hope 😀

Ah, probably won’t work for you then unfortunately ☹️ It works here because he likes baths a lot more than he likes school!

Tell me about it! (Mumsnetting on my phone when I should be working!)

He does actually like school so at least that’s not a problem!

Sunrise alarm clock to slowly wake up, timer set for when has to be out of bed.

Timer in the bathroom for how long to wash up and get downstairs.

Downstairs you've laid out clothes already night before and he can get dressed in the living room whilst you're sorting breakfast.

Breakfast - toast or something easy (cereal is a recipe for disaster).

Visual timers like ⌛ are perfect. You can get them online for kids, they come in bright colours and get them in 5/10/20 mins slots.

Make sure bags are packed and ready night before.

Toothbrush in the kitchen so as soon as breakfast is eaten, they can be brushed.

Some sort of visual checklist - some fab ones on Etsy so he has a tracker of each task he needs to complete.

It's never going to be perfect - as you know it's a disability so aiming for a perfect morning will only cause you to be stressed and that will slow him down even more. Just aim for good and that's enough!

I was going to suggest a stopwatch or phone alarms if he responds to urgency.
Would some sort of prompt chart or list help as well? same routine every morning......up, breakfast, check bag (packed the night before so you've chance to look for anything), clean teeth / shower, uniform on, out for the door......

Is he competitive? I found “on your marks, get set, go!” worked quite well on my two. Mine do not have ADHD though I don’t think - they just got distracted but were uber competitive.

We had records of PBs up on our wall. It made the “FFS hurry up!” more positive though as it was more “come on Fred - we are aiming for a getting dressed PB today!”

Make it a game. Set timers and challenge him to have accomplished a task before the timer goes (a SHORT timer! 3 minutes not half an hour). Race him - can he be dressed by the time you’ve brushed your teeth, can he put his shoes on before you, can he be in the car by the time you’ve locked the front door. These are the only ways I can get my DS to focus on something.

Work out how long it takes to do each thing, and have a realistic routine that finishes 15 minutes before he needs to leave the house. Allow time for things like using the loo, and checking his bag. Then, for the first couple of weeks over the summer, get him to suggest songs for a morning playlist.

Then, you make the playlist, but with an activity for each track. If he struggles with time perception, music is much easier to follow than a clock, and after a while you get to know that at a certain point in the song you should be putting on your socks, or buttering your toast.

Then practice for a few days before school and make any tweaks necessary.

The final 15 minutes allow time to look for missing items, but can also be a reward time of something fun if he gets through the routine on time. And the very final song needs to be fast and exciting as it's the "get out of the house" song, so he'll need to transition from his treats activity to leaving mode, and go through the checklist kept by the door of what he needs to have with him on as school day.

For my 11yo inattentive AuDHD DC who has been navigating middle school for the last 2 years (which is run like a secondary):
Alarms work for us. It feels less personal/less of a nag coming from a machine. We have them for every stage of the morning process.
Everything is done in the same order every day. Toilet - dressed - teeth - wash face - hair - make packed lunch and breakfast (currently teaching her how to multitask this eg make sandwiches whilst toast is toasting) - eat (often whilst finishing making lunch - again, multitasking!) - pack bag - shoes - go.
I offer vague reminders/prompts eg "Are there any lesson-specific things you need today?" with the aim of giving her some ownership over remembering and hopefully, eventually, teach her to ask herself the same question.
Definitely buy as many of each item as you can and label everything very clearly with the full knowledge it will be lost and school staff will only briefly check the most obvious area for a name. Plus DC will also invariably fail to spot it in amongst the lost property, if they even remember to go and check the box I buy second hand uniform specifically because I want quantity over condition. Things usually come back to us as they're well named (🌟 for me!), but it can take a while and you need spares in the meantime.
Allowing her to fail on the small stuff. It's horrible to watch, but without any consequences, they won't figure out their own systems to keep themselves on track.

There should also be a recognition from the school that his ADHD is going to make him more forgetful and disorganised. Have you met with the SENDCo yet? A reasonable adjustment would be allowing him more leeway for forgetting items. As an example, at DD1's school, all DCs are allowed to forget their PE kit/an item from it a number of times over the year. My DC gets a slightly greater number of passes.

Would also agree with trying different orders for the routine. You could do some practice runs maybe over the summer?

For myself for whatever reason, getting dressed is a MASSIVE block, I think because I just get really overwhelmed with it because of sensory and decision related stuff. If I try to get dressed as the first thing I do when getting out of bed it will take me ages, I will procrastinate, I'll look at my phone, I'll snooze, I'll just avoid doing it because I REALLY don't want to.

So I tend to do teeth/wee/go straight downstairs, in PJs and a dressing gown. Once I've had a bit of breakfast and a coffee I am much more able to go back upstairs and then I can get dressed in less than 5 mins. Because I'm awake, and it's now urgent because I am actually leaving the house, and I don't want to go out in my dressing gown.

I don't do that for the younger kids because they don't care about being dressed, so the actual process of getting them back upstairs and then downstairs again would be too much of a nightmare, so we just bribe them with TV - if they are ready by a certain time, they have time to watch TV for 15/20 mins while they eat. Then we have a second set of toothbrushes in the downstairs toilet and DH gets them to brush their teeth and do a wee as the last thing out the door (which is genius because previously we were always ending up skipping morning tooth brushing as it didn't seem to fit in anywhere).

Have you considered medication. It was a game changer for DD (also inattentive).

Mornings were particularly hard (I feel your pain), so the paediatrician suggested a v small dose of fast acting medication to get her through that, and it worked brilliantly.

But overall, DD has found being medicated makes school so much more bearable (and her grades in the subjects she didn't like and couldn't focus on rocketed). She says that asking her to work without meds is like trying to do things without spectacles.