El-e-e asked about making the morning routine less painful for her...friend, and I am happy to share some ideas I picked up...from a friend.
Step 1: Think it through. What is usually the hardest part? If it's getting dressed, do you need to hit the thrift store or an online sale so you can add a few extra pairs of pants to the rotation? Do you need to make a Target run so nobody is scrambling for socks as the bus rumbles by? Do you need to take 20 minutes on a Saturday afternoon to purge an overfull dresser and reduce decision fatigue? Do you want to mix it up a bit the next time you're at the grocery store, so you have more options for appealing breakfasts and lunches?
Step 2: Take it off your plate. This is going to sound a little bit California; bear with me. It's not your job to get a 7-year-old dressed. It's not your job to make a 7-year-old eat breakfast. You're in charge of providing clean clothes and good food and clear expectations, but 7 is old enough to own some responsibilities. Visualize yourself picking up that load and moving it from the "my job" column into the "not my job" column in your mental spreadsheet. If you are doing the work of getting anxious about her deadlines, she doesn't have to. This doesn't mean that you are flippant about being late for work or school or whatever, but that you let her carry the worry about the consequences of dawdling. You can also enlist older siblings in the battle against tardiness. They can be surprisingly effective at prompting without hectoring.
Step 3: Check on the sleep situation. Sleep deprivation makes everything worse, for everybody everywhere all the time. It makes you crankier and it makes you less able to fix solvable problems; same goes for your kid. Adequate sleep is the most important part of planning for more peaceful mornings. If you live in the US this is a great time of year for addressing morning routine issues, because your body clock is still saying, "Wait, what just happened?" It's the perfect time of year to ease bedtime back a bit, which makes it easier to give yourself a little more time in the morning. This is a step where "taking it off your plate" is especially important. You can't make a kid sleep (though you can surely make yourself nuts trying), but you can set an earlier cutoff time for screens and enforce quiet reading-in-bed time. You can't make a kid be perky and alert in the morning, but you can open the blinds 20 minutes earlier to let the time-change sunshine in, and you can plan ahead to work around slow risers' needs (see #5 below).
Step 4: Make a schedule with your child. Work backward from your ideal departure time. If you need the shoes and jacket and backpack on by 8:00, what time do you need to start getting arms in sleeves? What needs to come before that, and how much time does it require? I've included a picture of our white board with Stella's schedule, which we constructed together by talking about what she liked to do first and how much time she needed to do it. Post it in a prominent place, and talk your kid through it until she has internalized it.
Step 5: What needs to happen the night before? If you have an owl kid in a lark world, make the most of it. Lunch is easy to make ahead of time. Fixing a portable breakfast in advance can reduce stress too, because if you discover that you need to tweak your schedule, you can still grab that bagel and eat it on the way. Laying out clothes in advance will mean that a sleepy kid doesn't need to burn through limited cognitive resources making decisions in the morning. My scourge is backpacks: just two days ago I was saying, "What do you MEAN I'm supposed to sign something two minutes after you were supposed to be out the door?!" (I refused, FWIW, despite tears and fretting. I will not feed that particular beast.)
Step 6: Build the habit. How can you make space in the mornings for supporting habit formation? You won't need to do it for a long time, because once the habit is in place it is likely to be self-sustaining. It feels good to be competent. It feels good to be prompt. All you have to do is make space for your kid to experience those good feelings consistently through a series of low-stress repeatable actions. This might mean that your morning cup of coffee needs to happen earlier or later for a few weeks. It might mean that you show up at work with your hair crammed hastily into a bun. But it won't mean that for very long.
Getting out the door on time in the morning is a complex skill that kids can absolutely master. Both halves of that assertion are important to keep in mind: it's not easy, and so it's 100% normal for them to need support in learning to do it. But at the same time, typically developing school-aged kids are capable of sequencing the tasks they need to complete in the mornings. Some of them will pick it up more quickly than others, but even the ones who struggle can get there.
Comments or suggestions are most welcome! And good luck to you...r friend, El-e-e.
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