Question:
I have a 9-year-old daughter with whom I’m having trouble waking up in the morning, getting dressed and leaving the house on time for school. I’m sure you’ve heard this a million times … I wake her up AND her alarm wakes her up, and then she snoozes/stays in bed for about 15-20 minutes while I’m getting dressed, making breakfast and getting the lunch box ready, and telling her to get up from across the house. Then she wants to stretch for like 3 minutes and then she’ll sit on the toiled staring at the wall for another endless amount of minutes … We’ve had this conversation of waking up ON TIME about a million times. She’s a “repeat offender” and I’m tired of the morning fighting to get ready on time. What can I do?
Answer:
What you are describing is how a school age child develops responsibility, self management and self-discipline and the key word here is developing. If you walk away before you see her get up out of bed then that is one way to change what you are up to in the morning.
Self-discipline is a skill that develops slowly and through repetitive practice from birth to 16 years old. The culprit for a lack of self-discipline is the inability of a child or adult to understand and manage their emotional responses. Learning to keep going when something is difficult, like pushing through in the morning to do the responsibility of getting ready for school , they have to practice and build:
tolerate and manage feelings to be able to keep going.
delay their need for pleasure and gratification.
problem-solve with the person who is helping them keep going.
Children in this age group are at the beginning of understanding that a difficult task forces us to tolerate big feelings like frustration, fear, and disappointment. It is important to keep in mind that you are helping her manage the big feelings and letting her know that they will pass, and they will feel better once the task is done. In the description you gave the big feeling is being tired and sometimes the feelings that creep up around the uncertainty of the new day.
It is perfectly normal for parents of children 11 and younger to have to check in on their progress, longer if the child is neurodivergent (e.g. ADHD, Anxiety, Gifted, ASD).
Right now you feel frustrated and belief something is wrong, but nothing is wrong. Her self-discipline and responsibility skills are at crawling level, if we use the metaphor of how long it took her to learn to walk.
From now on in the morning, walk into her room in intervals of 10-15 minutes and guide her through the process of getting ready for school. For example, you wake her up in the morning, turn off the alarm, stay next to her until she gets up and walks to the next activity. Walk away come back 10 minutes and prompt her to move through her next activity, but not with demands or “we are going to be late” prompts with declarative and supportive prompts like “I notice you’ve been sitting in the bathroom for a while, your body needs to eat before we go. I’ll stay here until I see you come out” then wait.
But again the fact that you have to prompt her every 10-15 minutes to move her along is perfectly normal for her age group and expected. So being a “repeat offender” is actually her just being 9.