how the heck do you get your LO to school on time.....

[babymutha]

dd will enter reception on Sept 12th. We were late for pre-school virtually every day, whether I got up at 6, 7 or 8am. DD v strong willed, won't dress herself unless she feels like it, won't let me brush her hair, takes 30-45 mins to eat a bowl of cornflakes, sits of toilet without weeing or pooing for AGES and then walks at the speed she feels like (although I have managed to enlist tree fu tom big world magic and a scooter to speed her along, so that is the least stressful bit of our journey). I don't want to spend every day YELLING at my child. Please give me your wisdom......

with my 2 dcs i get them moving with the promise of the tv. they have to be dressed, breakfasted etc before they get the tv remote. 1st ready chooses the channel. i do a countdown: youve got 15 mins tv left,10,5 ... maybe you could adapt this to time on a ds, dollshouse,puzzle, other favourite toy.
As a teacher i once had an arrangement with a parent that she'd bring ds in whatever state of dress/undress he was in by the time they had to leave. it wasnt more than 2 wks before he learnt to dress in time :)

My sister makes hers get dressed right out of bed...then down, breakfast, teeth and hair and out. No tv.

Oh and she shouts!

Oh yeah.

Secret weapon in the winter?

Radiator Pants. :)

3 in my house. We have to be out by 7.10am for the eldest, 8.15 for the two younger ones.

They just have to get up and ready. No questions asked. We have a strict routine and morning rules such as no TV till fully dressed, washed etc.

I make sure they all go to bed at a reasonable time. Getting tired kids out of the house is impossible.

@ radiator pants.

Seriously OP - just be a fucking hard arse. Less of the gentle parenting. Get dressed or yer out on yer arse in PJs. FFS. This is a child. TELL her to get her arse in gear (SN accepted etc).

*excepted.

?

I have 3 who are all good/hopeless in their different ways.

Ds (8) will be up at stupidly early o'clock, get himself breakfast efficiently & then watch telly. Quite often with most of his clothes back-to-front & no shoes/coat/book bag/PE kit. The rule for him is 'No TV unless you are PROPERLY dressed ready to leave for school, on pain of no TV after school'

Dd1 (6) is scrupulously tidy & organised but a dawdler - she will sit vacantly staring into space & chewing on one branflake at a time. Her rule is 'Breakfast is abandoned for the birdtable at 8am, so get it et'

Dd2 (4) has Random Wardrobe Malfunctions & then will have a spectacular meltdown because she can't go to nursery in yesterday's pants, odd shoes & a party frock. Her rule is 'Do not bother to throw tantrums as Mum will proceed to throw a much, much better one'

The one thing that we are rigid on is that 8am is departure time. Anyone who turns up at school eccentrically dressed, hungry or without vital kit, takes the consequences.

(Usually it's me - I arrive at work sans last night's marking & with my packed lunch still in the fridge at home...)

Seriously OP - just be a fucking hard arse

LOL- gonna laminate this and stick it on the fridge to give me resolve with DS(2)

• "Richman, did you order a Code Red on DS?"

-"You're Goddamn right I did"

You do need to be a hardarse. Luckily only have DD2 to deal with now. Gone are the days of 4, 5 & 6 year old. The morning goes according to my schedule and they have to fit in with it. Currently it's:

Everything packed night before. Uniform including knickers and socks laid out too.

Wake up Dd,
Go downstairs, I make her breakfast while she pees. When her breakfast is done I'm there making sure she gets out of the toilet.
I go and put my clothes on while she eats. So max 10 mins, if she isn't finished tough, she'll eat faster tomorrow.
Bung her in shower, she does teeth in the shower.
Out of shower, dried and puts undies and socks/tights on there and then (this avoids no knickers).
She goes and gets dressed while I do make up. If she isn't dressed by the time I'm done I will dress her which she hates.
Hair is a privilege, if you want to go to school with nice hair you better be dressed by said time or that's it going with bed head. I check uniform etc then if there's time she can have her hair done if there isn't its her own fault and won't get any sympathy from me.
Puts coat on while I lock up.
We leave.

Without hair it's around half an hour from her getting up, hair adds 15 minutes at the most. Hair related tantrums equals instant stop. As we can effectively leave without her doing her hair she is always ready 15 minutes early. Meaning even if she gaffs there is 15 minutes leeway. She knows if it is after 8:15 when we have to leave there's no tv or dessert that evening.

Think you will have to toughen up OP. If she doesn't get dressed, deffo do the pyjama thing, like wise with shoes, my DD wouldn't put her shoes on one morning so I shrugged and let her go in in socks, it was raining and she got wet cold feet. My Mum was horrified, but she had to learn how to be responsible for herself. I do her hair in the car when we arrive, spent so many mornings faffing with hair, I just found it easier to do it as we get out of the car.

There's a more radical solution, if getting your daughter to school is such a stress. What about not taking her?

Perhaps your daughter raises such a fuss because she really really does not want to go. If that is the case, maybe it isn't the right educational setting for her. It might be better to home educate her for a few years until she feels ready for school.

If she actually DOES want to go to school and just won't cooperate with getting ready in time, then perhaps this is just a power struggle. In that case, stop playing the game. You could tell her that if she wants to go to school then she has to take responsibility for getting herself ready on time. You'll remind her and help her to get herself organised, but you won't nag her excessively or force her. If she can't manage to get out the door on time most days, then you'll take her out of school and free up her place for a child who can make good use of it, who wants to be there. Give her control over this part of her life and you can opt out of the power struggle. If you want to try that, this would be an excellent time to do it: your dd is not yet compulsory school age so there will be no legal consequences for you if her attendance is erratic at first. If she doesn't sort herself out pretty rapidly, take her out of school.

My older dd went to preschool for a while and I told her that if she wasn't ready to leave on time, I wouldn't take her that day. It didn't seem worth trekking off there for just half a session, and it would have been rather disruptive to the others for her to arrive late on a regular basis. She went less and less often until I pointed out that she would lose her place if she didn't go most of the time. I asked if she wanted to make more of an effort to get ready or whether she'd rather give her place to somebody else, which she did. Years later, when she went to school, she made great efforts to get herself ready on time because it was something she really wanted to do. She's a ditherer by nature but she wasn't late to school a single time.

Only on mn would someone suggest home ed as an a answer to a dithery four year old not getting their arse in gear.

Hard arse mother works on ds. I also break the morning down in stages - if they haven't had breakfast eaten and cleared away by eight am then in my mind we are starting to run late.

"Only on mn would someone suggest home ed as an a answer to a dithery four year old not getting their arse in gear."

Oh no, I'd suggest it in real life too.

To be fair, home ed wasn't my only suggestion. The threat of home ed was the other.

Some people have suggested that an answer to breakfast battles is allowing a child to experience going to school hungry. Others have said that an answer to hairbrush wars is allowing a child to go in unbrushed. Why not use the ultimate sanction and allow the child to miss out on school altogether if she can't get herself ready? It has the virtue of simplicity and takes all the conflict away. It's easier for children to learn to take responsibility for themselves if you let them experience the consequences of not getting themselves ready. In an ideal world, getting the child ready should be the child's problem, not the parent's problem. Why add stress to your life if it can be avoided?

I appreciate that this isn't an option which is open to all parents. People who live in a subarctic climate may not be able to allow their children to go to school without shoes. Those who work full-time probably can't let their children opt out of school. But for those who do have this tool at their disposal, what's wrong with using it?

Well to my thinking it's actually irrelevant whether a child wants to go or not (bullying etc excepted).

Forgot to add, my mum used this technique on me when I kept running away from school in the first few days. At first she kept taking me back, but she soon got fed up with that. She told me she had better things to do than drag me to school and it was up to me whether I went. Then every morning she got me up and made breakfast early in case I wanted to go.

I lasted about three days before I started going in to school and staying there. I was a very stubborn child, but there was no point having a drama if no one would have it with me.

As far as I know, home ed wasn't a serious option for my family. It was practically unknown and I don't even know whether it was legal where I lived. But it would have been quite possible for me to miss the first year of school before education became compulsory for me, and I don't think my mum would have minded much if I had. She knew there was no hurry and I could learn just as much at home.

My mum was good at choosing her battles with a very temperamental small child!

so your child is 4? just get her up after you are ready - then supervise breakfast, washing and dressing . never leave the room.
do not allow tv, toys or any either distraction until she is done

I factored extra time into my school run so we always leave 10 minutes before we actually have to. This gives some leeway for recalcitrant children.

If mine won't brush their hair, they go in without it brushed (and DD's can look like a birds nest!)
I have done the whole PJ threat and never had to carry it through.
They have had to finish getting dressed in the car before.

Basically, we leave at 8:30 whether they are ready or not. School is one of the few things I am never late for.

I agree with the hard ass crew.

Twatting about is NOT an option in the Frost household.

Why not use the ultimate sanction and allow the child to miss out on school altogether if she can't get herself ready?

Not entirely sure how missing school is a sanction!

We are rubbish at most things, but we are almost never late for school.

what we do is prioritise, and lower our standards/expectations. I think that's what we do, anyway. It works whatever it is.

If it takes 40 minutes to eat - feed her asap, let her watch tv or something while she does it if necessary. While she does this, get her clothes ready, and get ready yourself.
if she refuses to dress herself, do it for her. It isn't for ever.
the hair thing is more tricky - I have boys so don't know how you handle that, mine just look a bit scruffy if I can't sort theirs out.

the walking is a case of going out earlier I think, scooter should help.

I was lucky to take mine in the car when he was in reception, most of the time.
Now I have two at school we seem to be able to get ready very quickly - even if we wake up at 7.45 we can be out by 8.15...just hand them some toast sandwiches, after they are dressed, (uniform is kept in a large tub in their room, or they wear the previous day's if it's not too bad) and the longest thing is getting their shoes on as we can never find them!

It helps that ds1 is super scared of being told off so HAS to be early enough or he gets really worried.

I agree you've got to be tough, set a routine and stick to it. If they aren't getting dressed put the clothes on yourself, if they persist, consequences. I have shoved DD out the door naked before now, she put her entire uniform on in about 10s after that. Breakfast has been whisked away and dumped in the bin too. We are just going into our 5th year of school and we have not been late yet.

Get as much as poss ready the night before, including uniform and your own clothes laid out and if you need to leave at 8.30, make 8.20 your leaving time, get that into your own head and you will always have a bit of leeway.

At our school there seems to be a reasonable tolerance of lateness, you do have to go via the office and sign the child in, but it seems that there are no other consequences. DD says "why can't we be late, you are allowed to be late, so and so is late everyday and never gets into trouble", grrrr.

Oh and mine mess about every day - they do ds games, lego, tv is on constantly. We don't use a table to eat at. It is very informal.

But somehow none of this impedes us - we were late about twice in the last year and that was unusual for us, I can't remember the reasons but they were fairly acceptable...oh yes, once I had to take ds home when we had arrived, and bring him back (had the car luckily) because we/ he had forgotten something crucial. It was a case of a couple of minutes, we'd arrived about half an hour early so I thought there was time to do it again but the traffic was awful

Our school is harsh on late children - I hate that, especially as there is at least one family with a chronically late parent and they are always arriving ten minutes after the bell.

It makes me, and their mum, feel terrible as the school seems to blame the children when it is entirely up to her, they can't do anything about it.

I remember the days getting 3 DCs out the door by 8:15 :(

Yes yes yes to hardarse. No tv until you are dressed, 15 minutes for breakfast and everyone standing by the door at 8:15. If you are minus shoes, bag, jumper? Tough.

Funnily enough my 8 year old is the most organized as he hates being late. When my DH is off work, he does the morning and I go to work early. DS follows the routine TO THE LETTER. He says to my DH, dad it's 7:45 breakfast is over. Dad, it's 8am, you should be dressed. Dad, shoes on by 8:10.

Unlike 13 year old ds1 who daydreams, loafs about and is seemingly unconcerned his train leaves in 4 minutes and he has a 10 minute walk to the station.....