Getting children ready for school

Do you struggling in the morning to get your children ready for school? Are your mornings chaos with meltdowns and tantrums and lazy children who are distracted by TV or can't find their shoes (because they're not really looking)? Are you doing all the work making all the lunches, getting school clothes ready, packing bags, finding missing items? Do you spend your mornings feeling frazzled and yelling at your children?

One of the easiest things you can do to help your mornings run smoothly and to get your children to help out is to write a list of things that need to be done. Specifically the things your children need to do.

Maybe your child has just started school this year and is not use to the new routine and all the bits that go with getting ready for school (because it's much different to kinder). Make a basic list for them to follow:

1. Have breakfast
2. Brush teeth
3. Get dressed
4. Pack bag

In the early stages you'll still be doing the bulk of the work because your child is still young; making lunches, helping to pack bags and get your child ready for school. Yet there are certain steps for them to learn early on so they know how to get ready for school, get into a routine and take on some of the responsibility.

As they get older this list will grow and include things like them making their lunches, remembering their drink bottle, putting their school clothes in a certain spot so they know where to find them the next morning, making sure they've got their reader, school diary and homework packed.

Keep the list you make on the fridge and point to each step asking your child if they've each step. Eventually your child will know what is expected of them, know they things they have to do as apposed to the bits you're doing and you can work together to get ready, instead of you having to do it all and being overwhelmed.

And remember: do not let them watch TV before school!

The system is broken

In days gone by it was acceptable to hurt and beat your children into submission. There is that old saying "Spare the rod, spoil the child." As though a child who was never hit with a rod was instantly a spoiled brat.

Around the 1970/80's people began to get psychological about parenting and bringing to light how hitting and berating your children was emotionally and mentally damaging. Still it took a while to catch on because those old parenting ways of hitting instead of talking were ingrained in our society. Even now we have the great smacking debate with parents and experts still unable to agree on whether we should be allowed to smack our children or not? You still get parents saying, "I was smacked and I turned out ok."

Firstly smacking is different to child abuse (in which children often come out damaged). We need to get straight about that! One small whack, tap or light hit on a bottom (which is what a smack is) is not abuse. It's not necessarily necessary and there are other ways to get a child to behave... still it doesn't equate as abuse. How the smack occurs determines whether it is abuse or not, it's not primarily abuse simply because it occurred.

I once witnessed a mother hit her small daughter on the bum repeatedly, over and over again, because her daughter had touched and broken a glass bottle in a supermarket. To the staff and supermarket managers one broken bottle by a little girl was nothing. To the mother, who seemed to take it badly, it seemed to hurt her ego as a parent: as though she'd failed somehow because her daughter broke someone else's property. Firstly it was an accident. Secondly she was very young little girl, 2 or 3. Thirdly the reaction by the mother was far too excessive and I called her up on it, whereby she looked at me embarrassed and quickly walked off dragging her daughter behind her. That was abuse and I doubt very highly, if that was a regular occurrence in that little girls' world that she turned out ok. She didn't look ok at the time, she looked terrified and unable to escape her mother's clutches and repeated whacks. She cried and flinched and did not seem to understand what was happening to her or why. Heartbreaking.