Early Morning Transitions
Helping your Child get out of the door in the morning
Remaining calm and regulated yourself is so important because if we allow out emotions to hijack the situation we can no longer support our child to regulate via co-regulation. It also means that if we become dysregulated we will have less patience and tolerance so are less likely to connect successfully to our child and therefore the whole situation can escalate.
If you can get down to your child’s level, whether that is sitting in bed with them, at the table or on the floor this helps your child to feel more understood and less threatened by hierarchy. It also provides more of an opportunity for you to show open body language and this leads nicely into point 3.
Validate your child’s feelings by narrating back to them what they have told you such as ‘ahh you don’t want to get our of bed yet because you’re tired’ or ‘you don’t feel like going to school today so you don’t want to get dressed’. If your child doesn’t like you labelling the specific feeling for them you can say something like ‘you’re finding this hard/having a big feeling, i’m here for you’. The point in validating is to help your child feel heard and understood as this will strengthen your connection and can stop the situation escalating.
Tap into your child’s internal motivation by thinking about their strengths and what they are interested in. If you can use internal motivation instead of external motivation (bribes, rewards, punishments etc) then your child will be much more likely to do the thing they need to AND it will help to develop that skill for the future. For example if your child didn’t want to get dressed but they liked playing the floor is lava you could play with them and lay out their clothes on cushions and have them jump from one to the next and put that item of clothing on.
Offer support to your child in the most relevant and appropriate way. This might be transitional support get downstairs in the form of a piggy back. It could be making something fun and playful such as who can find their shoes first, or you try to wear your shoes on the wrong feet and struggle to walk.
