HOW TO GET YOUR FAMILY BACK INTO A ROUTINE

How To Get Your Family Back

INTO A ROUTINE

It’s that time of year again. The one that creeps up after the silly season and whacks you on the head saying “Time to ‘adult’ again. Get it together!” Gone are the festive cocktails and relaxed sense of time - it’s back to school time.

You start thinking about school supplies — the markers, the erasers, the pencils, the books, and laptops and schedule all the appointments — the haircuts, the uniform fittings, the teacher meetings and sports.

We know we need to get our kids back on a schedule that is conducive to a well-functioning household and their school performance and after months off for some, this can be a difficult time for families who have let the routines go out the window.

We’ve put together a few tips to help ease back into schedules again and re-adjust body clocks.

Sleep

If we don’t start adjusting our kids’ schedules now so that they get used to waking up earlier, those first few weeks of school are going to be pretty miserable.

Compare your current routine to the back-to-school routine, and assess any gaps to see what’s missing.

Start the week by waking them up first a half-hour earlier, so that they’re tired for bed that night and dial bedtime back a half-hour earlier.

If their sleep routine is way out of whack, you’ll need to slowly start with half hour changes for a few days. Take another half an hour in a few days time and so on, until they are on their regular sleep routine again. They will need a week to regulate their body clocks before school starts.

Morning routine

You know the scene: no one has their shoes on, breakfast is a bust, somehow 30 minutes has turned into 30 seconds, and it’s a mad dash to get out the door.

The key here is to slowly reintroduce structure. Otherwise, if you try to change too many things all at once, it’s going to be a huge shock to their little slacker systems and things will get ugly.

We all know that the morning routine currently looks a lot different than how it’ll be once the kids are back to school. Use the same compare-to-find-thegaps exercise here.

Lay out a more consistent routine such as wake up at a specific time, have a shower, get dressed, eat breakfast and brush teeth before anything else.

It’s time to cut any TV or computer games until their morning routine steps are completed so they have a motivator to help them follow through.

Meals

Begin planning your meals around the times your child eats at school to get them back into that schedule. If you normally eat around 6 pm during the school term and it’s blown out to be much later, it’s time to bring it back. If your kids are grazing all day at home, bring back in the lunch hour.

Exchange activities

Encourage alternate behaviors. For instance, if the school schedule is, “No video games after dinner time,” you could start a family game night that replaces game time or a movie. Encouraging different behavior is often more effective than punishing unwanted behavior.

Once their body clocks are adjusted, they’re going to have more focus when they go back to school, they’re going to be able to cope with all the changes, and when they get home, there will be less meltdowns.