The Whole Parent Podcast
The Whole Parent Podcast
How to Make the Morning Madness Suck Less (#45)
If your mornings feel like a daily emotional avalanche, lost shoes, floppy limbs, scratchy socks, MELTDOWNS, you’re not alone. In this episode, Jon goes back to the original Whole Parent format and answers real listener questions about morning routines, meltdowns, and the brain science behind why kids fall apart at the exact same time every day.
Instead of asking “What am I doing wrong?”, we flip the script:
What if the problem isn’t you… it’s the lack of brutal predictability?
Jon breaks down how kids’ underdeveloped executive function makes mornings uniquely hard—and how a simple, boring, repeatable routine can take the mental load off their brains and yours.
In this episode, we cover:
- Why mornings are so hard for kids’ brains
How an underdeveloped prefrontal cortex, weak time sense, and limited executive function make “getting out the door” way more complex for kids than it is for adults. - The power of “brutally predictable” routines
Why turning mornings into the same simple sequence every day (with visual aids, checklists, or songs) actually reduces meltdowns and resistance. - How long it should really take to get out the house
Jon’s 20-minute rule for shoes/coats/backpacks—and why building in buffer time makes you less likely to snap, rush, or bark orders. - Connecting before correcting
What to do in the first 3–5 minutes after kids wake up, and why a few minutes of cuddle + connection can change the whole morning. - When your kid’s “routine” includes a meltdown
How kids unconsciously bake the meltdown into the pattern—and how to replace that step with connection, play, or a job instead of power struggles. - Brain-based hacks that actually feel doable
Including:- Turning the morning into a game instead of a battle
- Giving kids simple “jobs” that channel their energy
- The “put the shoes to bed” trick to end the Great Shoe Hunt every morning
Listener questions in this episode:
- Nancy:
“My 6-year-old wakes up slow and my 3-year-old wakes up fiery. No matter how early I start, we’re either late or someone is screaming. What am I doing wrong in our morning routine?” - Dave:
“Every morning falls apart at the exact same spot: shoes and coats. My 4-year-old goes floppy, my toddler zigzags half-dressed, and I feel my patience evaporate. How do I break this pattern without becoming the drill sergeant I swore I’d never be?” - Anonymous (aka The Great Shoe Hunt):
“Every single morning turns into a shoe hunt. One shoe is in the pantry, the other in the bathtub. Is there a brain hack for kids who cannot keep track of their shoes?”
Key Takeaways:
- Your mornings probably aren’t failing because you’re a “bad” parent. They’re failing because kids’ brains can’t carry that many steps without structure.
- A brutally predictable routine + a visual aid (chart, checklist, pictures, or song) can remove 80% of the morning chaos.
- Build in more time than you think you need so you’re not parenting from panic and hurry.
- Connection first, then routine: those first minutes after wake-up are prime time to fill your child’s emotional cup.
- If your kid’s “routine” currently includes a meltdown, your goal is not to shame it away—but to replace that step with play, jobs, or connection.
- Responsibility (like putting shoes “to bed” at night) isn’t punishment—it’s how kids build agency, confidence, and resilience.
If you
When you say what am I doing wrong, the answer is actually less of what you're doing wrong and just what you're not doing. And what you're not doing is making this entire process so brutally predictable that their brain, which is underdeveloped, which has a hard time predicting the future, which has a hard time to uh orient steps in a series. These are all executive functions. You have taken away all of this mental and cognitive challenges from morning routine. And now it just becomes a game of just following the steps. Hello and welcome to the Whole Apparent Podcast. I am so excited that you are joining me today. You can tell that this podcast is going to be a little bit different than the last couple that you've heard just by that little intro. And I already have a bug sitting on my microphone, which is funny. Sometimes these little stink bugs get into my house and then they like run amuck because I'm on my porch. It's a beautiful day here. I'm excited because we're like, I'm back out on the porch, even though it's mid-November or late November. Thanksgiving's this week. And uh oftentimes at this time of the year, I have to have like all sorts of heaters on and stuff out here because I'm in an uninsulated room in Chicago. But um this morning it was just like warm when I woke up, so I was like, all right, let's record some podcast episodes, or a podcast episode at least. Um, this is a little bit different than the uh the last couple podcast episodes that I've recorded, and I wanted to give you a little bit of an update on that before I jump and dive right into our material for today. Um, as you probably can tell, the podcast has been pretty different in the last boy year, year and a half than how it started. When we started, I was doing caller or not really caller, emailed in questions, where parents would email me questions or DM me questions, and I get hundreds of questions a day from DMs and things like that. And I would take those and I would kind of organize them into questions that are around similar ideas, like sibling rivalry, or in this case today, we're talking about morning routines, a bunch of questions that stem from getting up in the morning and getting out the door. And I would change the, or I would I would put those questions uh onto a just a very simple Google Doc, and then I would read them live on the podcast and I would just respond in real time. Sometimes I would make a couple notes ahead of time, but I would really try and respond as if I was on group coaching. So for those who might not know, I do a membership, and inside the membership, I do monthly group coaching. I've been doing that for over two years, and actually when it first started, it was like weekly group coaching. So I've done like hundreds of these coaching calls where I sit with people and I ask questions answer questions just like this. And what I've received over and over from people inside the membership is like the best part of the membership is watching just the replays. They're like, I use this as my monthly podcast from you. And so that's how the podcast started. And it was great. We had a ton of people listening. We covered some awesome things, had a bunch of five-star reviews. And you would say, John, why'd you change anything? And the answer is because I'm a little ADHD, uh, not a little, I'm a lot ADHD, and I got kind of bored with doing the same thing every time. And so I started interviewing different parenting experts. And those interviews did not always attract the same amount of attention and interest just because it wasn't as practical, like boots on the ground type parenting answers to questions, not as much neuroscience. It was talking to experts that I was really passionate and excited about talking to, but but not everybody was was here for it. And so I adjusted that over the the time that I was interviewing people and I started to interview people and then envelop those into uh episodes where they were scripted out. I would read the script for you of exactly what I wrote out. So it's more like my writing, less like my talking or my coaching or my social media content. And I would script those out and then I would insert the interview, like the key interview clips or the best parts of those interviews into those grander podcast episodes. And I would add all sorts of music and high production value. And while that is really great, and I think that those episodes are really, really good and will kind of stand as a monument or a testament to a tremendous amount of work. The problem is I just can't pump them out very quickly, right? If you look back, episodes come out, you know, every three weeks. There's periods where I have to take entire months or several months in a row off just because it's impossible to record uh and edit and write and do all the stuff and organize the interviews and host the interviews and go back for uh questions that we missed and stuff like that after the fact. So what I'm doing now, or what what it eventually morphed into, was uh doing kind of standalone episodes where I was scripting them out and I didn't even have guests. And if you look back at the last few, several of those are those episodes where they're scripted. I read off what I've already written and I add all of this music, and it's kind of has like a this American life type feel if you are familiar with that podcast. And again, those just take so much time. They take so much and an inordinate amount of time of editing and writing and uh an additional research because I like cite a lot of studies and things like that. And while I love that, and I would love to do that kind of professionally or or full time, the truth is the podcast is a net negative financially for me. So uh I pay money to do this podcast, I don't get paid money to do this podcast. And so as a result, um again, I just wasn't putting them out very quickly or or frequently. And uh it means that people are left kind of in the lurch, just going, well, I came here for practical parenting advice, and now you're giving me this like kind of philosophical storytelling parenting philosophy, I guess that's the right word. And while that's important and exciting and fun to listen to, I want more than one episode a month. So, all of this long, long, long intro to say, today we return back to something that I've been encouraged by so many of you to do for so long, which is just John, can you just start answering questions again? Like, you don't even have to edit it, you don't have to add music, you don't have to add anything. Just like edit, just just just put these, hit record, record these podcasts, and then you can put out, you know, one a week, or even maybe more than one a week if if you're able to record more than one a week. And so here I am. We're talking about morning routines this morning, and I'm gonna jump in with our first caller question. Um, this one is from Nancy, and she says, Hi John, my question is about morning routines. My six-year-old wakes up slow, and my three-year-old wakes up fiery. It's hard to balance all the emotions coming at me before 8 a.m. Somehow I end up bouncing between brushing someone's hair, negotiating which socks feel too scratchy, and no matter how early I get started, we're either late or someone has screamed at each other. I grew up in a house where mornings were tense, to put it mildly. I can feel some of that old wiring kicking in. Okay, I can tell Nancy it's read my book. What am I doing wrong? Okay, Nancy, the first thing that I want to say is that you're not doing anything wrong, right? So let's put aside this notion that there's a right and a wrong way to parent in these moments beyond not harming your kids, right? So I don't wanna I don't wanna start from a place of saying, well, if I was perfect, none of this would happen, and it must all be on me. I love parent-centric ideas or thinking about parenting rather than child-centric ideas about parenting. What I mean by that is rather than blaming the kid for having an underdeveloped brain or brain blaming in some way like just kids in general, inherently, all kids are bad or all kids are annoying. This is where you get phrases like the terrible twos or the you know, terrible threes. I've heard three nature, all of this stuff. Um, instead of thinking of it in those terms, it's much better, I think, to think about parenting from a parent-centric model, which it looks at, okay, I can't change everything, I can't fix everything, but I can do those things that are possible for me to do. And those changes will, on the long, in the long term, on the grand scale, make positive change for my kid. And so I love that you're starting from that point, but I want to rephrase that what am I doing wrong just right off the bat and say, okay, it may not be that you're not that you're doing anything wrong. It may just be that there are better or more effective ways to do morning routines that don't lead to this kind of snapping. And the first piece of advice that I give people with morning routines, and you've already kind of done this here, you've already said this, and so I'm kind of giving this advice not just to you, Nancy, but to anybody who's struggling with morning routines, is to set your expectations that it's going to take you 20 minutes to get out of the house a minimum. So if you have to leave the house, like for in my case, we have to be out of the house by 8.35. We got to be in the car, 8.35, driving to school. My kids' school is about 20 minutes away and they're supposed to be there between 8.50 and 9 o'clock. I know that I need to give myself a five-minute-ish buffer in case there's traffic or we get stopped by a train or something like that. And just in general, because I know even if I say 8.35 is my intention, if it's 8.37, I don't want to then be two minutes late, right? So I've even built in another five-minute buffer for myself there. And sometimes we need it because, like I said, you can get stuck by two trains going the opposite direction or something like that. So first thing that you gotta do is you just gotta set that intention. It's gonna take 20 minutes getting out of the house. So if I'm 8:35 is my leave time, that means at 8.15, I need to start that movement of saying shoes, coats. In my case, it's usually like snowsuits, uh, extra clothes. My kids go to four school, so there's a lot of additional things, obviously, a lunch for lunch, things like that. And I gotta start that movement 20 minutes before we have to leave. And for people who don't have kids, I don't know why you'd be listening to the podcast, but in case you are listening and you don't have kids yet, that seems crazy because it's like, how long does it take to put your shoes on and walk out of the house? For for an adult, a minute, maybe two, right? But for a child, when you're navigating all of these things, and it might come up, hey, by the way, I'm still hungry, I gotta eat, or I have to go to the bathroom, which is actually a good thing to do anytime before you leave the house because it's just, you know, do it there and where you have parental uh reminders to do that instead of even maybe your kids on a bus or something and then they pee their pants and then you've got to go drive to school or something. So it's always good to do that before you leave the house. But all of these different things are gonna pile on top of you. And so setting that intention that you have to leave 20 minutes earlier, or you have to start to leave 20 minutes earlier than you intend to leave, is like first and primary. And so, Nancy, you're already doing that. You're already starting from the best possible thing, which is no matter how early I start, uh, we're either late or someone snaps. So you've already started by saying, well, at least you're not putting that additional rushing on kids. And I will say, this is a good moment to just say when you have that 20-minute buffer to get out of the house, you are far less likely to be like, oh my God, we're late. Come on, hurry up, hurry up, hurry up. And that stuff really, really gets to kids in a negative way. And it makes them melt down, and then it's slower getting out of the house, and it just everything is is worse. So you might think, oh, okay, well, for we only have five minutes to get out of the house, I can just start barking orders and pushing people out of the house. But that is not usually going to work. It's usually going to backfire. So now that we have our our leave time, whatever that is for you, Nancy, for me it's 8 35. Now we've moved back 20 minutes. So we've we've said, okay, that's when we're going to start putting our backpack on, putting our shoes on, putting our coat on. And by the way, if you wind up getting way out of the house 10 minutes early or even 15 minutes early, playing in the front yard for an additional 15 minutes before the bus comes or before you have to get in the car is actually a very regulating, positive activity on the whole. So even if you wind up going, okay, John, but but I don't need 20 minutes to get out of the house. I only need five. And now my kids are outside and they're they're cold and it's they have 15 minutes to stand out there, then give them more clothes. Like dress them up warmer. Because that extra 15 minutes of just calm play before they actually enter neath enter into that space of of shifting into a new environment is a net positive for them. So let's let's start with that intention. We're gonna leave, we're gonna start getting ready 20 minutes ahead of when we actually have to leave. And even if that means that we're early, that's okay. Uh, next, I would work backwards from that leave point so that my mine's 815, I don't know what yours is. I'd work backwards from that, and I would set the next, let's say, 30 to 45 minutes. I would create a routine that is brutally predictable every single day, the same thing. And like I said, it does it it could it could only be 30 minutes. It only has to be 30 minutes. But that routine is going to include things like breakfast, as I already said, going to the bathroom, um, getting clothes on, although I have actually skipped that one. I put my kids in the clothes that they're gonna wear the next day uh overnight. I don't know if that's weird, but I've just learned that if PJs is one more thing I don't want to have to deal with in the morning, especially because I'm getting my kids all these additional clothes to go out and spend all day in the forest. And so uh I just do that the night before. So you you may have different ones than me. Maybe yours is, like you said, uh brushing somebody's hair. I have uh one daughter and I have to brush her hair, but she's only one year old, so it takes about six seconds. Uh none of my other kids have long enough hair that I really have to brush, so maybe that's part of your morning routine. But every single aspect of this morning routine is going to be brutally predictable. And I would make a physical visual aid for that. So I would literally sit down with your child, you can have them, especially the six-year-old, uh contribute to that visual aid, contribute to that morning routine. They can draw the pictures for it or something. And I would literally like, you know, if it's a checklist that they can check off on uh with like a whiteboard marker, or if it's a sticker that they can put on each one of their things or whatever, or if it's a post-it note that they can cover up, or you can make like a if you want to get really fancy, you can go in and make like a fold-down chart where they fold down each step of it. Uh I have that downloadable that's available for people inside my membership for bedtime routine, and I think I might even have one for morning routine. But whatever it is, you're going to have those, let's say, a minimum of four steps that they're going to do every single morning. And those steps are going to be brutally consistent. So now we've taken out of the equation basically any uh change or any variability. We've just said every single morning, here are going to be the steps. Bop, bop, bop, bop, bop, eight fifteen, now we're getting our backpacks on, we're getting our shoes on, boots on, whatever. Bundled up, lunch in the lunchbox, whatever, out the door. Right. And if you're early, great, now we're playing in the front yard or the backyard or on the street corner, wherever that looks like for you. When you set that brutally predictable routine, now a lot of that tension, a lot of that aggression, a lot of that feeling rushed, um, just like the old wiring that comes in when things don't go well, a lot of that can be mitigated by the fact that you're actually things are going to go well. And I know that that sounds kind of silly or or like foolish, but when you make things so brutally predictable, then kids just kind of fall into that pattern and they fall in line. This is the exact same thing, and I don't I should probably look ahead at my other questions here before I answer this because maybe somebody's gonna say they really don't like going to school. But if if one of the issues is that your kid doesn't like going to school, one of the top pieces of advice for that as well is make a routine that's brutally predictable, that they just that it just happens the exact same way every day, so there's no variability, so that they're not um kind of finding ways to derail the process. They're gonna do but, bop, bop, but. And here's the beautiful part. If there's a visual aid, if they've helped to plan this, now you can actually, after week one, maybe after I would guess with your six-year-old after week one, maybe with your three-year-old, it's after week two or week three. You can start to say, like, what's next? What's next on the routine list? Next, it's this, next, it's this, next, it's this. You can make up a song if you don't want to do a visual aid, or you can make up a song that goes with the visual aid. Whatever you want to do, every single step of that needs to be brutally consistent. Now, two weeks in, you can start to add some variability. You can say, Oh, do you want to do this first or that first? I'm not saying that I would do that, but if you need to do that for whatever reason, you can start to do that. But before two weeks, I would just make that brutally consistent. And what will happen is you'll realize very quickly a routine that took at the beginning, we said it's gonna be a 30-minute um morning routine followed by a 20 minutes of uh actually getting out the door into the car, onto the bus, whatever. That 50-minute routine you probably can shrink down by the end of week one, by the end of week two for sure. You're gonna realize, you know what, that 30-minute routine probably only takes 20 minutes now because my kids are actually doing what they need to do, blah, blah, blah. And so let's give it 25 minutes instead. Okay, we've been getting out the door in two and a half to five minutes for two weeks straight. We can shrink that 20-minute time down to 10 minutes, right? No big deal. You can adjust the timing of it, but I wouldn't adjust the steps. So, in other words, to go take it all the way back to the beginning, when you say, What am I doing wrong? The answer is actually less of what you're doing wrong and just what you're not doing. And what you're not doing is making this entire process so brutally predictable that their brain, which is underdeveloped, which has a hard time predicting the future, which has a hard time to uh orient steps uh in a series, right? These are all executive functions, things that you as an adult hopefully have mastered. You have taken away all of this mental and cognitive challenges from morning routine, and now it just becomes a game of just following the steps in the series with the visual aid, with the whatever, and all of a sudden they're out the door. So that's where I think we really need to get to that point. And that is going to be it's gonna carry through all of our questions today, but that's where I want to begin the episode, or I guess we're like halfway through the episode probably at this point, but that's where I want to go first because understanding how powerful routines are, not just because of discipline, not just because of these other positive things, but how powerful routines are because of the underdeveloped nature of our child's prefrontal cortex, which is the part of their brain which organizes items and systems and uh can do these executive functioning like tasks to get out the door. The reason that you can get out the door in a minute and a half and it takes them five or ten or fifteen or even twenty, right? All of those things, we're removing those barriers. And once we remove those barriers, it's gonna go a lot more smoothly. And some days it's still gonna go bad. If that's the case, that's okay. That's why we can repair. And I have episodes on that, and I'm not gonna get into that today. All right, let's go to question two. All right, question two comes from Dave, and he says, uh, I could really use your help with this one, John. Every morning we reach the shoes and coat part, and everything falls apart. My four-year-old becomes floppy and dramatic. My toddler is zigzagging around the house half dressed. I feel my patience evaporate. What's hard is how predictable it is. The same spot, the same meltdown every single day. It's like our routine hits the same emotional pothole, and I don't know how to steer around it. How do I break this pattern without turning into a drill sergeant that I swore that I wouldn't become? I love that, Dave. So, to begin the answer to that question, everything I just said to Nancy about the brutality of the routine becoming the thing. And now I'm gonna add a layer to it. I'm gonna add a layer to it. So, number one, we've already gotten to the point where we say a lot of this is falling apart, probably because your kids have identified that part of their routine for the morning is the emotional meltdown. So I want I want to just kind of like frame that in terms of your kid will find routines and patterns because the world is not predictable to them. Say that one more time. Your kid will find routines and patterns, maybe where they aren't even there, or or where you wish they weren't, because exactly because the world is not as predictable and consistent as they might like it to be. So, with that being said, part of your morning routine, Dave, what I've just explained to Nancy, part of your morning routine is a meltdown. That's one of the steps in your morning routine. And what you're hoping to do is replace that meltdown with something else. And so I here's how I would do that in two ways, building upon the idea that we can create this routine. I would do the exact same steps as Nancy. Build the morning routine that's brutally predictable. Um, give yourself additional time when it's actually time to get out the door. That's gonna help you as well. Now, I'm gonna take it one step further. Before the routine starts, I think we add a step, like literally right when your child wakes up. And that step is to connect emotionally with your kids. I know a lot of parents, and I understand this impulse, and I'm not shaming anyone because I've done it in our house. We have been in seasons where this has been the morning routine. A lot of parents will have a kid who gets up at 6 a.m. and you said you have a four-year-old who becomes floppy and dramatic, right? And your toddler is zigzagging around the house. I'm gonna just assume here that you might be up in the middle of the night, right? And if you're not, that's fine. But in my case, with a one-year-old, uh, the last year I've been up a lot of times in the middle of the night. Two nights ago, I was still up for most of the night, which is crazy to think about. But she woke up in the middle of the night and she's just like wired, wide awake. Not upset, not unhappy. Um, this kid has been a champion sleeper for her basically her whole life. Um, I don't in comparison to my other kids, at least. Maybe other people might say, well, she's not that great of a sleeper. But man, if you had my first three kids, you would probably look at her and go, wow, this is a huge blessing and break for you that she ever sleeps through the night, or that she ever, you know, is able to put herself back to sleep in the middle of the night, which is basically my other kids could not, or two of the three of my other kids could not ever do that until they were much older than she is now. But a couple nights ago, she wakes up and she's just like wired, like happy, awake, just like crawling around in her sleep sack, just like trying to be like, hey, come on, go, let's get up, let's be. It's 1 a.m., right? This is like literally the direct middle of her sleep cycle. So she goes to bed at seven, she wakes up at seven. So this is the direct middle of when she's supposed to be asleep. And she was up for two hours almost on and off. Um, she basically never snoozed during that time and then slept in until like 8:30, 8:45. Uh, but in the mornings, all of a sudden, how John, how does this relate? In the mornings, we created kind of a de facto routine that one of the first things my kids do when they get up is they have to entertain themselves because either me or my wife is just up with our kids all night. And I know that I'm gonna get canceled for this. But hopefully, if you've made it this far through the podcast, you have a general feeling that I'm doing the best that I can. Um, but part of entertaining themselves is like sometimes they just go down and grab uh the remote and turn on a show for themselves. Or they sometimes go down and they find uh the Nintendo Switch and they just start playing it. Or do some other screen thing dysregulating thing. And then they go over to the snack drawer and instead of eating, you know, like a well-balanced breakfast of eggs and and beyond sausage or something, they open that thing up and they're just basically eating sugar. Because I mean it's it's like a granola bar, a protein bar, but it's like 90% sugar, right? And so it's like, oh John, don't have that in your house. Oh John, don't have screens in your house. Oh John, hide the remotes. Okay, we could do all of that, and that's what we do in the best scenarios. But when our on some mornings, and there have been times when our one-year-old, or at other times it's my young older kids, when they were super little, six months old, whatever, we're like for a week straight, our kid feels like they're getting up and kind of taking care of themselves. And if it means that we can be get another extra hour of sleep, not wake up the the baby, and you know, everybody else can be more well-rested, that kid's gonna be more dysregulated. Like, that's the trade-off that we have sometimes. But what I know is that a lot of those meltdowns, the floppy and dramatic, as you're saying, the zigzagging around the house, oh, super wired. I can tell you that a lot of those, in at least in my house, come from that time where if my kid has watched screens in the morning, if my kid has not had, you know, enough protein for breakfast, that stuff happens. It happens. And I just have to kind of smile and laugh and say, well, this is what this is the cost of that extra hour of of rest or snoozing or whatever on our on our hand uh on our part. And you know what, to my kids' credit, if we ever, if they ever need anything, if they ever get hurt or something, they just come wake us up. They don't they don't care about that. But but sometimes, you know, especially when the nine-year-old's up and he can kind of navigate things and help help his siblings with things, um, they just take advantage of that opportunity to say, okay, I'm gonna have a I'm gonna have a couple episodes of Bluey or whatever before before uh mom and dad really get up or or dad comes out from being with a baby or whatever. And what we can replace that with in our routine, Dave, this is a long roundabout way to get, what we can replace that time with in our routine is saying, okay, instead of doing that the first 20 minutes when they're awake, if you can do this, if it at all possible, you connect deeply with your child. Connect with them emotionally, have conversation with them, uh, just cuddle with them. We did that this morning with my kids, just get ex you know, 20 minutes of cuddle time. And that has the exact opposite impact. There's this researcher, Jacques Penkstaff, who is the first behavioral neuroscientist basically, and he talks about how you know three minutes after your kid wakes up is like prime neurological brain like reset for the day. And if you can connect deeply with your child in those three minutes, they're gonna feel connected with you for basically the whole day. And if you don't do that, you're gonna have a hard time connecting with them for the whole day. So the first thing I would do is go, as hard as it is, and I know that there aren't always seasons where this is possible, really deeply connect with your four-year-old and your toddler first thing in the morning when they first wake up. Again, three to five minutes. It doesn't have to be a huge thing, an extra cuddle. You know, just hey, I love you, just being close to them. And a lot of that is gonna build up that emotional and the relational capital, and it's gonna help you kind of carry through the whole morning routine. The second piece of advice that I would add to all of this, and that was really long way, long way around way of getting to that one. The second piece of advice is I would say we need to somehow turn this into a game. We can we know that there and is excess energy there, especially for the toddler to get out. We know that the excess energy is there. We know that they have a need that they're trying to meet. Um, that's why I say the for the four-year-old, the floppy and dramatic, the need that they need is to connect with you. That's what they're trying to do. For the toddler, there's another need that's met, needs to be met, which is like just they're wired, they're just running everywhere. That need, the way that we meet that need is by playing, turning this into some form of game. So, yes, we can do the routine, but maybe one part of the routine is a game that is kind of active, right? One part of the routine is after we get our shoes and our coats on, we run from one end of the house to the other and back again. Or we run around the block as fast as we can. Whatever that piece is, we need to create one mark that is a fun, positive connection experience for our child. Usually that's through play, and it seems like it needs to be active. And if we can add those things to our routine, and Nancy, by the way, you're free, feel free if you're still listening. Continue to do that as well. Add a game to your morning routine. I think it's a great thing for any of us to do. But especially for those kids who are, they've created a routine which includes a meltdown, which includes chaos. We have to create a routine that targets and kind of aims that chaos. Um, a great example of this, and I'm I'm I I can't spend too much longer on this because I have to move on and finish the episode. But a great example of this last night um I was standing in line at Pop Belly, which is a sandwich place here in Chicago. I think there's locations elsewhere as well. And um I always order my wife's food at the end. So I go there with all my kids, but without my wife while she's working, and I order her food at the end so that it's not like super soggy. It's a hot sandwich, so it can be like real soggy if it's we've been there an hour or something. So I order at the end. And my uh three year old was done with being there. He's almost four. He was done with being there. He's like running around, he's like tearing. Things up. He's like getting into stuff. There's like new higher orientation. They don't know what to do with him. And I realized that while I was ordering the sandwich, I had to assign him a job or a task. And so I told him, and some there was a mom in front of me in line without her kids, and she was like, Man, that was really brilliant. I love that. You should share that with people. I said, Hey, buddy, I have a job for you. And he comes over to me and I go, Hey, can you uh can you go stand? Well, our table is near the bathrooms. Um, all by the way, pro hack, right? Sit near the bathrooms. My three-year-old in the middle of his mac and cheese was like, I have to be, and then we like, we're right there. So it's great. Anyway, we go, I say, go over, stand by our table, and I want you to count the number of people who go in and out of the bathrooms while I'm ordering the sandwich. I need to know how many people go in and out of the bathrooms. And he's like, okay. And so he runs over there and he doesn't even do it. He like gets distracted by something else that my son, my my nine-year-old's doing, and he like winds up playing with him. But I needed to redirect him from causing chaos. And so I had to create a game to redirect him. Just saying, don't do that, stop that right now. Do you sit right here? Is almost always gonna receive that pushback because why the reason that they're doing that craziness or running around half dressed is because they're trying to get a fundamental need met. This is what I talk about in chapter two of my book, right? Like you there is a need that needs to be met. Unless we meet the need, we are gonna continue to see the behavior. Their kids will meet their needs in uh in maladaptive ways if we don't give them adaptive ways to meet them, right? And I could have given my five-year-old another task. I could have said, okay, you stand by the bathrooms, you count the people coming in and out. I could have said to my five-year-old, don't let them go in the bathroom after these people, right? I'm gonna we we can stack the jobs, right, on top of each other. All right, so that's what we're talking about routines. What are the types of things we can add to our routines so that we don't become the drill sergeant? And by the way, if you want, don't want to be the drill sergeant, you have to replace that with the the reason the drill sergeant is effective is this is what I was trying to get to and I forgot. Uh the reason the drill sergeant is effective is because they bark orders and they're like really firm and they are there's a lot of energy there. You can give bring that energy without that posture. So you can bring the same amount of energy without the you know, hey, do this or else. Um, you can you can my wife calls it green energy. You can just be, hey, like let's do this instead. Redirect positive. Okay, last question. Um, here we go. Uh this one is oh, this person did not send their name in. So I don't know who this is from, but it's a funny question, so I I want to keep it. It says, hey John, okay, I have a serious parenting situation for you. Every single morning in my house, uh, every single morning in my house turns into a shoe hunt. My six-year-old shoes vanish completely into another dimension. We'll find one in the pantry, one in the bathtub, or something. Do you have any brain hacks that will work for this? I do. I do have a brain hack that will work for this. Everything that I've said so far, turn it into a game. Yes, yes. The great shoe hunt actually lean into that, right? But I think another great hack here, and this is kind of goes with the setting up the morning routine at the beginning. And this is this is a classic morning issue that people have. Included in the morning routine is getting is setting yourself up for success the night before. And a lot of parents do this by after the kids go to bed, they pack the lunches, they get all the backpacks together, they line up everything for everybody. And I'm not opposed to that. If that's how you want to do this, you go ahead and do that right now. Go find the shoe in the bathtub at night before you go to bed. Don't go to bed without knowing where the shoes are. That's totally something that you can do. But if you want to empower a six-year-old, who, by the way, might be seven soon, right? Might be eight soon, these these kids at some point are gonna grow up and need the to learn discipline and responsibility. And not in a negative way, in a positive way, right? They wanna, they, they have to learn responsibility because responsibility grants a child agency and autonomy. And children who uh who are given tasks like this, like, hey, keep track of your shoes, wind up being kids who feel confident and resilient, right? So if we do everything for our kids, they're not gonna feel confident and resilient. We're encouraging them to find ways and adaptive ways to do this stuff, it's gonna make them confident and resilient. So this is positive for your child, right? When I say it responsibility and discipline, these are things that make people feel good about themselves. Okay. So what I would do with the six-year-old is I would I would turn this into a game as well. But the way that I would turn this into the game is actually the night before I would say, like, the shoes need a place where they sleep. And I love this phraseology. The shoes have a place where they sleep because kids fundamentally understand that they have a place where they sleep. And they understand that every night at the same time they go to bed in this place. And now we can make a story about how our kids, the shoes, need to go to sleep. And this would be a great children's book, by the way. Maybe I'll write this someday as a children's book. But the shoes need to find a place where they sleep. And we can do that in a couple different ways. We can have a shoe rack where all the shoes sleep together. We could have literally something as simple as some masking tape on the ground in the in the mud room area where our kid has to put their shoes in this box and this is their bed where they sleep. You could literally uh have a cardboard box. You could have a little chest where the shoes sleep, and they have to go in there and they have to close it up so that it's dark and they can go to bed. But you really what you want to establish is this routine for your child where they're doing this the night before and they can feel a sense of agency. And that part of bedtime routine now becomes, did you put your shoes to bed? And by the way, that can also trigger to them that it's time for them to go to bed. So this becomes kind of like a double uh framing around routines of saying, hey, this is the game. The game is put the shoes to bed, your kid goes and finds them. Probably your kid's gonna have a much clearer picture of where their shoes are that night, where they probably took them off, you know, within the last three to four, five hours than the next morning after they've just slept on it. Not always, but some uh some kids always know where their shoes are, some kids never know where their shoes are. I can tell you from experience, my nine-year-old, um, he he will know where something is that he buried in the backyard a year ago. Like he has an incredible memory, it puts me to shame. He frequently knows where my stuff is, and I don't. Um he was actually out in the backyard looking for something that somebody pulled out of my wallet, uh, just not even a week ago. Or, you know, that happened, and then he was trying to find it today. He knew where it was. Um, when it comes to his shoes, this kid has no recollection. And it's because it's an unconscious habit for him to take off his shoes. It's an unconscious habit for him to just kind of do this and he doesn't think about it. So it's not like he feels himself putting it down, it's just happens, right? And then he doesn't think about it because it's become so rote and so um the you know part of his day that he doesn't ever have to can even consider. Well, now if you make that routine of here's the shoes have to go to bed, which by the way, we've done in our house in in some form or fashion. And we've oscillated back and forth between like, I'm just gonna lay out everything for them the night before because I don't want to have to deal with this, and between like really trying to instill that sense of value and responsibility. But when they have that, they can really do this, and it's incredible the positive association that kids have when they have something like that. So uh I cannot save you the great shoe hunt every single morning, but I I do think that one of the best things we can do is to create those other routines. And this couples as a bedtime routine too, where you're putting the shoes to bed and now we're gonna go to bed ourselves. Um, but that's the way that I would do this. That's how I would handle this. And it is a brain hack because it's play-based. And anything that is play-based is inherently a brain hack because it works with a different part of their brain. If they see it as a chore and a task that they're being forced to do, they're going to be resistant to it, no matter what the kid is, especially younger kids, but um all kids will be more or less resistant to that. But if they see it as like this task that they are doing together in a shared way, and you can go put your shoes to bed at the same time or something, right? You don't have to do this all on their own. But that's how I would solve that, and probably that adds back into the other two questions as well. I don't know if uh in Dave's case, right, if a lot of the reason that his four-year-old becomes floppy and dramatic is because he can't find shoes. I don't know if part of the six-year-old uh and three-year-old with Nancy, the reason that it's tense in the morning is because they can't find their shoes. So please feel free to use all of these guys. And I hope that uh I hope that it helps you. All right. That is what I have for this episode on morning routines. As always, if you want to support me, the podcast, if you want to support me on social media, the way to do that is not only to like and subscribe and share all of the content that you see there, but also to head over to Substack. On Substack uh for $5 a month, you can just be one of the people who donates to make sure that Whole Parent can keep going. Always join my email list. I'll have a link to that in the show notes where I send out emails every single week with great advice, parenting advice. Uh some of that more philosophical stuff that I talk about on episodes. You can obviously on Substack, I post all my emails on Substack for paid subscribers, so you can always see my previous emails there as well. And yeah, that's what I have for you today. I hope that all of your morning routines go smoothly. I know that they won't always, um, but I hope that this stuff helps you parent a little bit better today. This has been the whole parent podcast.
