How to Be a Happier Parent: Raising a Family, Having a Life, and Loving (Almost) Every Minute

by Kj Dell'Antonia

  Other parents set a departure time and hold firm to that. Leon Scott Baxter, father of two and author of Secrets of Safety-Net Parenting, says his daughters lagged and dragged and lingered every morning amid his constant harrying: “Let’s go! Get your shoes on! I’m going to be late!” Eventually he told the girls he’d be leaving at 7:25, with or without them. “My oldest must have been in third or fourth grade and she was lagging. At 7:25, I told her I was leaving, and I walked out the door. I got in my car. She looked out the window. I backed the vehicle out of the driveway. She scrambled out the door with backpack and papers in hand. She tumbled into the van. A minute later she realized she was wearing her bedroom slippers. She begged me to go back. I didn’t. She wore her slippers at school the entire day.” The same child, he said, started college this year and is “incredibly responsible.” That’s not something he credits to the slippers incident, but to many years of expecting her, and her younger sister, to take charge of themselves when it was appropriate, even if they didn’t always get things right. “I think allowing her to feel some discomfort as a result of her own choices and mistakes when she was younger has helped her turn into someone who can rise to the occasion as a young adult,” he says.

  A key to making this work successfully for your family is deciding what you’ll do when your kids blow it (and they will). I’ve read stories of parents who stepped over a forgotten lunch in the mudroom, just to make the point that it’s the child’s job to remember, and your parents won’t be there to save you every time. That’s not our style, if for no other reason than I have proven many times that if you are counting on me to remember your things, you have backed the wrong horse. I will put the wrong skates in your hockey bag and am just as likely to forget that lunch as you are, and maybe more.

  But if I do see the lunch, I’ll grab it—because, as my friend Catherine Newman, author of Waiting for Birdy, puts it, independence is not always the goal, and never the only goal. (Imagine, for a minute, what you’d say if your thirteen-year-old stepped over your eight-year-old’s forgotten lunch without comment.) Encouraging children to take responsibility for some elements of their mornings makes mornings go more smoothly. Letting them feel the consequences of a failure will make everyone happier in the long run, as they learn to take care of their needs, but that doesn’t mean you have to force those consequences on them. In most families, those things will happen often enough without your “help.” Working together for a successful morning makes everyone happier, too.

  DO MORE THE NIGHT BEFORE

  I do better in the mornings if I prepare. Most mornings, my husband is the preferred parent to get breakfast going for everyone. (He says, “I’m grumpy, but at least I don’t bite.”) If he’s out of town, I get ready for morning in a way he doesn’t feel the need to, setting out everything I need for any breakfast plans, leaving notes for any kids who might need instructions before I get up at the last possible minute, and structuring things so that I don’t need to make any decisions. I’m not at my best in the morning, and I know it.

  I stole this idea from a friend, a fellow mother of four, who set a breakfast table nightly right down to the bowls of cereal, filled and covered in plastic wrap. The same friend, when all of those children were very young, put them to sleep in their school clothes, a strategy I would totally have emulated if I’d known about it before my kids got attached to their pajamas. Similarly, another friend bought only fleece-lined shoes and slippers for her children when they were in preschool and did away with socks altogether. “I hate socks,” she said. “They’re nothing but trouble.”

  Make or help with lunches the night before. Help with the packing of backpacks, then remind regularly about the packing of backpacks. Lay out clothes, especially if one of your children is indecisive in the morning. When my kids were small, I bought four sets of hanging shelves for their closet and put one day’s school clothes on each shelf straight from the laundry basket, underwear and socks and all.

  Fill the coffeemaker. Lay out your own clothes. Hang your keys in their spot. Do everything you can for morning you, and do it right after dinner, not last thing before bed.

  TURN OFF THE TECH

  There are typically two stages of family morning life: the one where the kids naturally get up earlier than most people can function, and the one where it feels impossible to get them up at all. When you’re in the first stage, television and other gadgetry can be a lifesaver. They let you shower, make breakfast, or go back to sleep for a little while (more on that in Chapter 6, “Screens Are Fun, Limiting Them Is Not”).

  But once you get past the TV-as-babysitter stage, you quickly enter the TV-as-distraction stage, along with a multitude of other gadgets. For many families with older children, early-morning tech is a shortcut to a tardy slip. “No screens in the morning,” says Jen Mann, a mother of two in Kansas City. “It makes a huge difference. Everyone can focus on what needs to be done and not get distracted so easily. I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took us to realize that was our issue.” If your children are heading straight for phones or screens when they wake up, they’re probably not getting their lunches or homework together, and they might not even be eating that breakfast sitting in front of them. Instituting a no-screens rule will help them get moving—and if you’re checking emails and skimming Facebook yourself, try setting those things aside until you can give them your full focus. You might find you move a little faster, too.

  MASTER GOOD TIMING

  The other day in the car, I asked my kids, “How long do you think it takes you to brush your teeth and get your coats and things after breakfast?” “Nine minutes.” “I don’t know.” “Fifteen minutes.” “Five minutes. It should take five minutes.”

  Nope, I said. Twenty. Twenty, almost without fail, maybe fifteen if there are extenuating circumstances, like a school day everyone is looking forward to. And then I proved it, setting a timer when I first told them to go brush their teeth, and turning it off only when they were all in the car.

  If they knew I was timing them, they could go faster, but the real goal of the timer wasn’t speed. It was more practical. I know that to get places on time, I need to count backward from when we’re supposed to be there, and to do that I need to know how long things take. Twenty minutes is fine—if you allot twenty minutes. But humans are notoriously poor estimators of time, and young human beings doubly so. Sometimes it just seems like it ought to be faster. Sometimes we just so badly want it to be faster.

  Since magical thinking is as little help here as it is in other areas of parenthood, time yourselves, and don’t fall for the old “that was not a typical morning” routine. There is no typical morning. Someone will always be able to find only one shoe, and someone will always drop her entire binder on the floor, the one with the easy-open rings. Given that, how long does it take your family to get from “brush your teeth and get your backpacks” to completely out the door? Count backward from that, and that’s when the whistle blows. Any later and you’re fooling yourself. You may get lucky once in a while, but it’s the lucky morning that’s not “typical.”

  Timing ourselves is itself fun. We can try to break our record, or simply marvel when each and every person in the car had to stop and go back in for, in descending age order, coffee, sneakers, recorder, homework, and jacket, with the result that eleven minutes passed from the moment the first person got in the car to the moment we left the garage—and then another three when someone else turned out to have forgotten her gym shoes.

  SET IT TO MUSIC

  “We literally have a soundtrack,” says Whit Honea, a father of two in Los Angeles. “It plays from rise to door and all their cues are marked accordingly.” If a full, timed playlist seems like too much, try a song that’s the “get ready to get out the door” cue, whether it comes on automatically (if your household is equipped to make that happen) or whether it’s just something you play manually at the same time every morning. You d
o you. For some families, a little music makes everything better. I didn’t like the morning playlist when we tried it the first time, but I’m going to give it another shot.

  CHANGE SOMETHING BIG

  If your mornings are particularly painful because of some external problem—school start times, long commutes, one parent’s daily eight a.m. class overlapping with the other parent’s daily 7:30 staff meeting—it’s worth thinking about changing something big. Friends of ours who were extreme night owls, and who kept their daughters on a schedule that allowed for a lot of evening family time after relatively late work nights, chose their daughters’ elementary school based on the late start time. We don’t have that kind of school choice where I live, but if you do, and if it’s an affordable choice that better suits your life, why not?

  Ponn Sabra, a Connecticut mother of three, says she has to laugh when she considers what her family did to make their morning routine easier: they quit. After too many hectic mornings (and with a life that includes a lot of international travel), she chose to homeschool her daughters. Mornings, she says, became “a fun, lively time to enjoy being all together.” That’s an extreme solution to mornings that most of us can only dream about (and many of us, myself included, would consider a nightmare—I can’t imagine a parent less suited to homeschooling her children than I am), but sometimes imagining the extreme can open you up to ideas that, while “out there,” might be achievable, like petitioning the high school to change its start time or moving to a home where your children could walk to school.

  If something about your job makes your mornings miserable, like a regularly scheduled staff meeting that requires you to catch a train that leaves before your children are even awake or a commute that’s beginning to feel unsustainable, try to change that one thing, at least part of the time. Ask to move the meeting. Explore working part-time from home. Look ahead, because even a change that makes things better next year can make this year easier. Changing jobs to increase your happiness is the subject of many a book beyond this one. But you do mornings, well, every weekday morning. If your job is making your mornings miserable, that’s a lot of miserable.

  If a small change isn’t enough change, think big. Or maybe make mornings a little more fun just by imagining a big change. The school is unlikely to install a gondola ski lift between our second floor and theirs, but we can hope.

  GET UP FOR SOMETHING YOU WANT TO DO

  After all of that (and I’ve just described more than a decade of evolving mornings), the very weirdest thing we did at our house to improve mornings, the single one thing that meant the children would be on time nearly every day for school and that everyone had time to take a breath and get over whatever morning madness had set in and wake up all the way and head into the day, was the one thing I thought would make us permanently late for everything, forever.

  We bought a house with a big barn. And then we put a few horses in that barn, and then we let the apartment above the barn to a wonderful young couple, Kristyn and Greg, and they put even more horses in the barn, and Kristyn and I rescued some horses and put them in a new shed because they didn’t even fit in the barn, and then we added some chickens and then Kristyn and Greg added a baby and then we added some chicks and all of those things had to be taken care of, every morning, by all of us, and so we got up even earlier.

  I still don’t like getting up in the morning. It doesn’t matter how much sleep I’ve had, or what kind of alarm I use. I just don’t spring out of bed with a joyful step, and it seems likely that I never will. But when I threw myself headlong into a project I love, helping to run a horse barn, I put myself in a position where, most mornings, I have to get up earlier.

  We leave the house at seven-ish for the barn. We leave the barn at 7:40, no -ish, for school, after we do whatever needs to be done. On a really busy morning, we feed the horses (there have been up to nineteen), blanket them, put them out, muck the stalls, put hay in the fields for them, fill the water troughs, feed the chickens, and sweep the aisle. On an easy morning, when the weather is glorious and all the horses slept outside and the fields are conveniently growing grass for them to eat, we bring in a few horses who need grain in the morning, put them back out and clean up after them, then feed the chickens.

  Going to the barn is not always a “fun” proposition. There is always one kid who doesn’t want to drag the hose out over the ice and snow to fill the tub in the back field and another who thinks she’s doing more work than anyone else. But even then, when it’s done, everyone has stretched out, everyone has accomplished something, everyone has had some fresh air and done some work that had to be done for some other creature that can’t do it for him- or herself. The work itself may not be fun, but the satisfaction that comes with it is, as is the part where we are always among the earliest cars in the drop-off line.

  I’m not suggesting that you run out and buy a farm to make your mornings happier. But maybe making mornings more fun for you means doing something totally unexpected that takes longer, something that isn’t just “get up earlier” but “get up earlier for this.” A weekly diner breakfast. Morning family runs. A stop at an elderly neighbor’s to see if he needs anything, twenty minutes dedicated to getting dinner prepped together, taking time with one child to make a proper breakfast for the rest of the family. I don’t know. I hate getting up in the morning, but I get up earlier for the horse barn, and I’m happier for it.

  LET HAPPINESS IN

  There is nothing wrong. As I discovered after I tried to outsource my morning madness, when you’re in the middle of that getting-out-of-the-house swirl, you’re probably exactly where you want to be, doing exactly what you want to do—under the circumstances. Second only to the dinner hour, mornings are when families spend the most time all together, all in the same place. You’re all there. You’re all engaged, interacting, moving around one another in that complicated family kitchen dance. This is your time to be the people you are together, and that matters more than the clock or the forgotten algebra assignment. That doesn’t mean you don’t keep making things happen or you aren’t still going to hold the child assigned to empty the dishwasher to her job. It just means there really is something to enjoy in the mornings, although I struggled to find it until I pulled off the whole “get more sleep” thing.

  When something big really does happen, a catastrophe, or even just unexpected news, many of us find ourselves longing for the ordinary life we lived before everything suddenly changed. This is it. If we can shift our attitudes just a little, we can find a way to appreciate this time in all its abundance while it’s here, instead of when it’s gone. You can even put a little reminder in a good place, like a note on a mirror or your phone or computer home screen. I have a bracelet inscribed with the words “an ordinary day,” and when I look at it, I take my shoulders out of my ears and soak up the good. Even if it doesn’t feel that great.

  Mornings are still the worst. But they’re also part of the best. We get one a day, every day, until they’re gone.

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  CHORES: MORE FUN IF SOMEONE ELSE DOES THEM, AND YOUR CHILD SHOULD

  Children should do chores. That’s a controversial premise, although not everyone will admit it. A few parents will declare outright that their children are “too busy for chores” or that “their job is school.” Many, many more of us assign chores, or believe in them, but the chores just don’t get done.

  If this is true in your house, it’s a big part of the reason you’re not getting as much joy as you could be out of your family life. There aren’t that many issues upon which I’ll plant the parenting expert flag, but I’m a firm believer in chores. If you’re clearing your eleven-year-old’s dishes after every meal, then unless your child has physical or mental special needs that require this service, you are doing it wrong—as are most of our fellow parents. In a survey of 1,001 US adults, 82 percent reported having had regular chores growing up, but only 28 percent said that
they require their own children to do them.

  Our children are capable of helping us look after our homes and do the work it takes to keep everything clean, pleasant, and running smoothly, and in some families, they do. In pediatrician Deborah Gilboa’s family, children take on a big responsibility every year, depending on age, and keep that chore until the next child is ready to step up. At seven, they become responsible for the family laundry. At nine, they become the lunch maker for the family; at eleven, they become the designated dishwasher emptier; and at thirteen, they become responsible for making dinner once a week. Because her kids do those things, Dr. Gilboa and her partner are freed up to do, as she puts it, “the things the kids can’t. They can’t pay the bills. They can’t mediate sibling disputes. The only way we have the time and energy to do those things is if we delegate some of the rest.” Jennifer Flanders, a mother of twelve children (the oldest is twenty-nine; the youngest, seven), says something similar. “It quickly became clear that they could make messes much faster than I could clean them up.” For her children, the expectation that they will do chores is a given, and by the time they’re in college, each child is capable of the cleaning, cooking, lawn mowing, and general tending it takes to make a household work. For more on how that works, keep reading.