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MORNINGS ARE THE WORST

For us, a family headed by two night owls and populated by children who are slow to move at the best of times and can easily lose twenty minutes to the discovery of a yo-yo on the floor of a closet, mornings are the worst. They start so early. They go so quickly. They involve so very many have-tos and where-is-mys and snooze buttons and tardy bells.

I should find some more positive way to put it. Mornings are challenging, I should say. It takes a lot of effort for me to get up and get going at all, let alone to help others get up and get going. And it generally feels impossible to get up and get going in a manner that does not spread misery and gloom among all those around me. “Challenging” is a lovely word, suggesting as it does a spirit of enthusiasm, of embracing the day. It’s so much more in keeping with the spirit of bringing happiness back into our family lives.

But really, mornings are the worst.

It all starts with mornings, too. A good morning sets the tone for your whole day; a bad morning either does the same or sets us all up with something to overcome first thing. Becoming a parent changes most things, but it really does a number on your morning routine. Gone are the days of staying up until two and sleeping until ten, or leaping out of bed at the last possible moment to allow for an almost on-time arrival at work or in class.

Now, not only do we have to get up early, but we have to get up early enough to get others up, to do the things for them that they can’t do for themselves, and to help them learn to get up and get going. Worse, we have to do that with good grace, both to give everyone a pleasant start to their day and to teach by example: when something has to be done, stomping around and screaming at everyone while you do it only makes it worse. (I haven’t done that for months. Well, weeks.)

What Goes Wrong (Besides Everything) in the Morning

The process of getting yourself and your entire family moving in the morning is hard. It’s hard for nearly everyone. Aside from a few exceptional parents who are making quinoa crepes for breakfast (or are willing to lie about it for articles with headlines like “The Morning Routines of People Who Are More Awesome Than You”), mornings are the great equalizer. It’s not that you’re overscheduled. It’s not that you’re insufficiently present, or that your children have too much screen time or are hovered over, or any of the other guilt inducers of the modern parent. The problem is straightforward: it’s hard to feel happy when everyone has to be somewhere earlier than almost anyone wants to be anywhere, and some of the people in this equation are too young to take responsibility for getting themselves out the door.

Parents are up against a lot in the mornings. What goes wrong? Some answers: “They start too early.” “It’s dark and cold.” “I have to make coffee before I’ve had coffee.” “Having to rush everyone.” “High school starts at 7.” “Elementary school starts at 7:45.” “Whining.” “My child who gets up at five a.m. no matter what.” Everything from the weather to our children seems to conspire against us, and the boulders of morning doom start to pile up before we even go to sleep the night before, invariably too late to get enough sleep to face another dawn.

Lack of sleep is a big problem, but it’s far from the only problem. Mornings are packed chock-full of other parent challenges. Transitions. Multi-tasking. Things to remember. Deadlines, time limits, and cutoffs enforced by people and places outside of our control. Mornings are unforgiving and for most of us they come with a built-in performance evaluator ticking away on the wall of the kitchen and the car dashboard. How are we doing? We can see the answer right there on the face of the clock.

Then there are the children. The younger ones scoff at your foolish demand for punctuality. Time is meaningless to the baby who has a set-in-stone routine of blowing out his diaper the moment he’s placed in his car seat. The toddler with separation issues cares nothing about your need to punch in at work. A slightly older child may seem as if she can understand the kindergarten teacher marking her tardy and even dislike the feeling of running in to join morning circle after the bell, but that possible future pales in comparison to the allure of the plastic sheep she just found on the kitchen floor, which needs to join its flock, which she is pretty sure she put under her bed somewhere, or maybe in the laundry room.

Middle graders and teenagers have some of the same organizational problems parents have in the morning, but without even our dubious ability to get it all done in time. One forgot to print out his homework; another forgot an assignment entirely. Your daughter didn’t pack her hockey bag; your son really believes he can make a complex sandwich for his lunch in the thirty seconds he has before he leaves to catch the bus. You’ve coached them through the process a hundred times, and you’ll do it a hundred more before they’re capable of the kind of planning it takes to make a morning run smoothly, but meanwhile, your nine o’clock call doesn’t want to hear it.

Mornings can be better. There exist parents, not all naturally early risers, and not even equipped with superpowers, who have figured out ways to feel happier amid the morning madness along with getting the whole thing to run more smoothly. There are researchers and experts with data that might finally convince us to make some changes that can benefit our own health and happiness and that of our kids. One big hint: it starts the night before.

The Single Biggest Thing We Can Change About Mornings

Bed. It’s the most inviting place in the world early in the morning for older kids, teenagers, and adults—and the last place some of us can make ourselves go at night. Meanwhile, those younger kids, the ones that pop up at five a.m. and appear in our rooms, all sunshine, and then pinch our cheeks and shout, “GET UP, MOMMY! DADDY, GET UP!”? They don’t want to go to bed, either. Going to bed, and getting others to go to bed, is hard. But the later we go to bed, the more painful it is when morning comes.

Everything eats away at bedtime, from the jobs we’ve put off until the last minute to our desire to extend the part of day when we get to do what we want to do instead of what we have to do. The minute we go to bed, it’s practically tomorrow (an effect that’s worsened when tomorrow is Monday). When our children are young, the time after we tuck them in is our grown-up time. It’s time with your partner, if you have one. It’s time for yourself, to get things done or just enjoy the opportunity to read a book without interruption. As our kids get older, they start to feel the same frustrations. Especially if they’re loaded up with homework, or even if they’re busy after school with things they enjoy, they share that sense that the minute their time becomes their own, it’s time to go to bed, or they won’t get enough sleep.

What’s “enough”? The number of hours needed does vary, but not nearly as much as we think. Most people who say they do fine on five or six hours are kidding themselves. Seven is the happy medium for adults and the sweet spot where many can function at their best, which includes being a successful part of your family. I need eight at a minimum, and I guarantee you’ll like me better if I’m getting that eight hours consistently, not just on the occasional lucky weekend.

Children and teenagers need even more sleep than we do: eleven to thirteen hours for toddlers and preschoolers; ten hours for younger school-age children; nine to ten for teenagers. Those hours make a difference in grades, health, behavior, and general quality of life. More sleep means happier parents, children, and teens, and happier people work better together to have happier, and thus more manageable, mornings.

Even with all of that research pointing us toward counting backward from the number on our alarm clock and turning off the lights on time, most of us have trouble doing it. Relatively few adults, teenagers, or children get the sleep they need. How can we make that change?

Sell Your Kids on More Sleep

If bedtimes for your children have slipped, take a hard look at how much sleep they’re able to get after lights out. Upping that number probably means you’re going to have to put in some tougher bedtimes for a few weeks while you establish or reestablish an earlier routine. It’s hard to start dinner earlier, run the tub earlier, or cut short your family evening (especially if you or your partner often work late), but the morning benefits will quickly convince you that it’s worth it, and the long-term benefits are even greater.

You can help make the shift by changing the way you talk to your children about sleep and bedtime. Researchers have worked with preschoolers and seventh graders and found that, in both groups, learning the value of sleep led to children getting more. Both groups were given positive sleep education about the benefits of sleep in age-appropriate ways. Parents often get caught up in describing bedtime as a “have to,” as in “You have to go to bed now.” For little kids, sleep demands that they trade in a bright world of fun and company for a dark and lonely room (or at least, that’s how many see it) while older kids share the problems we adults have. At night, finally done with their homework, they’re doing their own thing. Bedtime just means morning and the school routine come sooner.

Researchers created a program for preschoolers that included teaching children how to put a teddy bear to sleep using a routine, followed by simple lessons on the importance of sleep and routine for people, too. They were taught that more sleep helped them be cheerful and get along with others, and given a bedtime chart and stickers to use to follow their own routine. The program, designed for low-income families, also included parent and teacher education on sleep. A month later, the children were averaging half an hour more sleep a night, even though their parents appeared to retain very little of their own sleep education.

For seventh graders, the same researchers designed a program that taught children about the ways sleep, or a lack thereof, could affect their grades, mood, health, and relationships. They offered lessons on basic sleep hygiene, including a bedtime ritual, consistency in waking and sleeping times, a dark room, and avoiding caffeine late in the day. Those students maintained better sleep times and sleep quality for nearly a year before reverting to earlier habits.

What these studies show us, as parents, is that how we talk about sleep and how much our kids understand the need for it is important. We can establish and maintain our own sleep routines and talk about how we give up evening hours in exchange for better mornings. And when we observe the impact of a lack of sleep in ourselves or our kids, we can note it, along with a plan to do better. Kids can see how differently they feel after a full night’s sleep, and although it’s not likely to make them hop into bed without the usual foot-dragging, it does make a difference.

With teenagers especially, parents tend to be too tolerant of activities that interfere with sleep but seem to help children reach other goals, like studying or sports practices. That’s shortsighted. Instead of looking the other way when our kids stay up late cramming for a test or a play rehearsal runs late into a school night, we should remind children that more sleep means better academic performance and help them spread out their studying over a longer stretch of time—even if it means we’re paying attention to details we’d usually leave to them. When it comes to other activities that bleed into sleep time, take action. If your child is young enough, step in and don’t send her to an activity that will go too late, and remind a coach or instructor that nine hours of sleep at night plus a seven a.m. bus equals a nine p.m. bedtime. Even if you end up compromising once in a while, teaching your child that you take sleep seriously sets them up to better manage their own sleep.

Get More Sleep Yourself

To really feel happier in the mornings, parents need to get more sleep, too. We’re better at everything when we’ve had more sleep, and most importantly for better mornings, we’ve got more patience and more ability to give our children the help and support they need to get going. Too little sleep, and we’re jumpy and reactive. Our brains are more likely to flood us with adrenaline in a stress response to what really isn’t a life-or-death situation, and that makes it really difficult not to blow up at the kid who got the waffle stuck in the toaster. (There’s more on this in Chapter 7, “Discipline: This Hurts Me More Than It Hurts You.”) But we’re parents, and that means we can’t always sleep when we want to, even if it would be better for everyone.

There’s no denying that infants make getting enough sleep impossible. Not nearly impossible, or practically impossible, but actually impossible. A survey of one thousand new parents by a British bed manufacturer found that two-thirds were sleeping only four contiguous hours or less. Five hours of sleep at night (still not nearly enough) during the first two years of parenting would be 3,650 hours; four hours a night is 2,920. That leaves new parents with a sleep deficit of 730 hours—or the amount of sleep you’d need, at five hours a night, for about five months. Looking to get a healthy seven hours? As a new parent, after two years, you’re more than a year behind.

You can do three things during this phase of life. You can allow enough time for sleep, putting yourself to bed early enough that if the baby was to sleep, you’d get what you needed. You almost certainly won’t, but many of us shoot ourselves in the foot by not even setting up the opportunity to accumulate those hours. Work with your partner, if you have one, to create trade-offs. Even if one of you is working and the other isn’t, you both need an equal shot at sleep. Next, create the best possible opportunity for sleeping when the baby allows. Shawn Stevenson, author of Sleep Smarter, says that when you can’t get quantity sleep, the sleep you get should be as high-quality as possible. His suggestions include giving yourself a caffeine curfew, timing your exercise for morning hours, and avoiding the second-wind syndrome at bedtime. Let yourself go to sleep when you need to.

Finally, go easier on yourself (and on your partner) when it’s impossible to get the sleep you need, whether it’s baby or kid sleep troubles or your own insomnia that’s keeping you up. Let some things go, in your mood, in your home, and in what you expect of yourself. You’re running uphill and that makes a difference in everything you do.

Once you’re out of the baby years, set an example for your children by making sleep a priority for yourself. Create a bedtime, stick with it, and talk about it. Set a curfew for digital devices, even those in nighttime mode. It’s not just the light that’s stimulating, it’s the constant input from tech and television that keeps our brains firing long after we’ve shut our eyes. If you’re in the habit of staying up late for pleasure or productivity, it will probably feel difficult to shut down sooner. What you want now isn’t always what you want later. Your tomorrow morning self will thank you for the gift of more sleep.

Changing My Morning Story

Even beyond working toward better sleep, there’s a lot left to improve about the average morning. Setting out to make mornings happier at our house was daunting and packed with failure. Take, for example, my attempt to adopt Gretchen Rubin’s “sing in the mornings” resolution from her book The Happiness Project. Rubin’s daughter Eliza was asked at school to describe how her parents woke her up in the morning. “With a good-morning song,” she said.

Now, lest you misjudge Rubin, this was apparently not at all accurate. “I’d only done that a few times in her whole life,” she said. But after Eliza described it in school, Rubin thought it must have made a real impression on her daughter. She vowed to make a habit of it, and succeeded. In her world, “singing in the morning really had a cheering effect.”

It didn’t in mine. Singing seemed like going too far, so I thought a morning mix of get-moving tunes might be the way to go. I created a Happy Morning playlist for the kitchen and tried, for weeks, to let those cheerful songs set our morning mood.

I hated it. I do not want to be nudged out of my morning fog by ABBA; I am not a morning dancing queen. But the real problem with my attempt to drown out my morning grumpies with a rousing version of “Everything Is Awesome” wasn’t that I didn’t like the music. It was that I was still fundamentally misunderstanding mornings. I thought I hated them, and I do. But I kind of love them, too. And it took a bigger failure to figure that out.

Paying someone else to do the things you hate to do to free yourself up for what’s important is a classic strategy, beloved by the “highly successful” and the “get it done” crowd. About the same time as I attempted to institute musical mornings, our sister-team of house cleaners moved, leaving us bereft. And since I’d long admired the household of friends, both doctors and the parents of five children ranging in age from two to twelve, I asked them how they did it. They had a housekeeper, an “Alice,” and she did mornings.

So instead of replacing the cleaning team, I hired one person, Betty, for the same amount of money. Betty, a naturally early riser, was not just willing but enthusiastic about arriving at our house at six a.m. and helping us get our day started, three days a week, before putting in a few hours of cleaning and heading home to her husband and hobbies. Even as I write about it, it sounds brilliant. Not a morning person? Hire a morning person! I could have an extra hour of sleep under my belt right now.

It was not brilliant. Not for me. To this day, hiring Betty stands out as the moment when I realized that what I thought I wanted was not what I wanted at all. I thought I wanted easier mornings for me. What I really wanted were happier—and easier—mornings for all of us.

A lot happens in the morning. Plans and lunches are made and discussed. Homework is gathered. Tests quickly reviewed for. Clothing is found to be too short or too full of holes. There were many pies being made in the morning, and before Betty’s arrival, my husband and I had our fingers in all of them. The advent of Betty meant losing a connection to our children’s day that I hadn’t realized how much I relied on. Instead of outsourcing so I could focus on the important things, I’d outsourced something that was itself important. Pretty soon we started joining back in, and there were too many cooks in the breakfast kitchen. In a matter of months, Betty moved on.

What was true for us in the mornings turned out to be true about a lot of things to do with the daily work of raising our family. I didn’t want to not do it. I just wanted it to be more fun, or at the very least less miserable. We regrouped after Betty. I knew what I didn’t want in the morning. I didn’t want to be late. Didn’t want to feel rushed. Didn’t want to spend it yelling. But when I focused on the didn’ts, things didn’t get much better. I quickly found myself once again sending a child off to school with a parting shout of “See, I told you you’d be late,” a slammed door, and a screech of angry tires. Wow, I thought, as I churned off, fuming. This is a really lousy way to start the day.

That was when I finally figured out what I did want. I wanted to give the kids—and myself—a good start. I wanted to be there in the morning. I wanted to be a part of that part of their day. And if I wanted to be there, then it had to be possible to turn mornings around.

Fortunately, a good start, in my mind, doesn’t require quinoa crepes or the family sitting down around the table together. If you can do that, you can probably move on to another chapter, because you’ve got mornings licked. A good start looked simple to me: it looked like a morning where children knew what they needed to do, had enough time to do it, and weren’t being yelled at every step of the way, even if things were going wrong. Even if they were going to be late. A good start looked like a morning where everyone worked together toward a common goal: getting the car out of the garage early enough to get to school not smack on at the starting bell, early enough that they could settle into their day. Once I knew what I wanted, it was easier to start figuring out how to get there. Here’s some of what I did, and what other families suggest, for turning your mornings around.

Making Mornings Better

GET UP EARLIER

Many, many ideas for improving the morning involve rising earlier. In her book I Know How She Does It, Laura Vanderkam analyzed 1,001 days in the lives of working mothers earning at least $100,000 a year. Many found more time to spend with young children, who naturally get up early, by embracing that early morning time instead of trying to keep the children up after dinner to play with parents who didn’t make it home until seven or eight. Other parents swear by getting up early enough to have a cup of coffee before the rest of the household appears, or to work on a personal project, read, or exercise. They have sex or balance their checkbooks. Like the White Queen in Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking-Glass, they believe six impossible things before breakfast.

Although I’ve finally managed to do this (I get up half an hour earlier to run a mile on a treadmill five days a week), I still resent the people to whom this comes easily. If you’re one of them, and if you can help your children to get up early enough not to feel rushed in the morning, you can probably change the tenor of your mornings more easily than those of us who wake up grumpy and never, no matter how much sleep we’ve had, want to get out of bed. Mornings at your house will probably be more pleasant than many. But even for families of early risers, it’s still hard to get out the door.

GET UP DIFFERENTLY

Until very recently, I never thought I was capable of getting up a minute before I had to. Instead, I focused my attention on getting up differently, and helping the children get up differently as well. For many years, my husband started the morning at our house, and going up the stairs to shake the children out of their sleep was his least favorite moment of the morning (and theirs). Our heaviest sleepers were, at the time, in the two top bunks, meaning that on many mornings, he was making his way up to the top to shake a child awake. That made him irritated, and it irritated the sleeper as well, setting off a chain reaction that more than once ended in a morning temper tantrum.

That is definitively not a good start to the day. The solution seems obvious—alarm clocks—and after some trial and error, and one child who kept setting her alarm for the wee hours by mistake, this helped a lot. The natural anger anyone feels at an alarm clock was directed at the clock, not Dad. There’s still a fair amount of checking to be done that they actually get up, but the onus is on them, not on us.

You can also wake the kids up differently by staggering their schedules. Naomi Hattaway, a mother of three in Virginia, found that when her kids woke up at the same time, everyone was stumbling over each other and getting in each other’s way. So instead, she encourages her youngest (her “morning child”) to get up first. “She gets time to adjust, wake up, greet the day, have one-on-one time with parents before her older siblings get up.” As children get older, the same system minimizes the rush on the bathroom.

ENLIST KIDS TO HELP

Because there’s so much at stake in the mornings—and yet, on a global scale, so little—mornings are the perfect time to let your children take responsibility for themselves. Depending on their age, they can, and should, be the ones charged with remembering their hats and mittens, sneakers, backpacks. They can make their own breakfasts, set their own alarms, help with siblings.

But what if they fail? Hit snooze and roll over, arrive at school without a coat in a New England January, leave the homework they worked so hard on in the middle of the kitchen table? Within the constraints of what works for you and your family, making those little failures their problem and not yours will go a long way to making your mornings happier in the long run. Parents who say they’re happier in the mornings put kids in charge of the things the kids can handle, and let their children’s responsibilities grow with the kids.

“One day our youngest (a first grader at the time) told us he knew it was time to get up for school because he could hear us screaming at his older brother,” says Angela Crawford, a mother of three in New Jersey. “That was our aha moment—something had to change. Every morning we were constantly battling to get him to do what he needed to do: print out his homework, pack his backpack.”

So, she says, they set rules for who did what and when. “Children pack their own backpacks, and we won’t bring them forgotten homework. I pack lunches in elementary school; once you hit middle school, you do your own. I once received an email from a teacher that my child had forgotten their homework and they asked if I would drop it off and I told them no and explained why. For two of my children getting a zero was punishment enough, for my oldest not so much, so if he missed a homework he would not be able to play with friends after school that day. We ask them (and remind them) to plan ahead and be considerate of us as well, and to ask for things like permissions slips or a ride home from sports practices before they’re walking out the door, but we don’t look for those things. If they don’t ask, it doesn’t happen.”

Other parents set a departure time and hold firm to that. Leon Scott Baxter, father of two and author of Secrets of Safety-Net Parenting, says his daughters lagged and dragged and lingered every morning amid his constant harrying: “Let’s go! Get your shoes on! I’m going to be late!” Eventually he told the girls he’d be leaving at 7:25, with or without them. “My oldest must have been in third or fourth grade and she was lagging. At 7:25, I told her I was leaving, and I walked out the door. I got in my car. She looked out the window. I backed the vehicle out of the driveway. She scrambled out the door with backpack and papers in hand. She tumbled into the van. A minute later she realized she was wearing her bedroom slippers. She begged me to go back. I didn’t. She wore her slippers at school the entire day.” The same child, he said, started college this year and is “incredibly responsible.” That’s not something he credits to the slippers incident, but to many years of expecting her, and her younger sister, to take charge of themselves when it was appropriate, even if they didn’t always get things right. “I think allowing her to feel some discomfort as a result of her own choices and mistakes when she was younger has helped her turn into someone who can rise to the occasion as a young adult,” he says.

A key to making this work successfully for your family is deciding what you’ll do when your kids blow it (and they will). I’ve read stories of parents who stepped over a forgotten lunch in the mudroom, just to make the point that it’s the child’s job to remember, and your parents won’t be there to save you every time. That’s not our style, if for no other reason than I have proven many times that if you are counting on me to remember your things, you have backed the wrong horse. I will put the wrong skates in your hockey bag and am just as likely to forget that lunch as you are, and maybe more.

But if I do see the lunch, I’ll grab it—because, as my friend Catherine Newman, author of Waiting for Birdy, puts it, independence is not always the goal, and never the only goal. (Imagine, for a minute, what you’d say if your thirteen-year-old stepped over your eight-year-old’s forgotten lunch without comment.) Encouraging children to take responsibility for some elements of their mornings makes mornings go more smoothly. Letting them feel the consequences of a failure will make everyone happier in the long run, as they learn to take care of their needs, but that doesn’t mean you have to force those consequences on them. In most families, those things will happen often enough without your “help.” Working together for a successful morning makes everyone happier, too.

DO MORE THE NIGHT BEFORE

I do better in the mornings if I prepare. Most mornings, my husband is the preferred parent to get breakfast going for everyone. (He says, “I’m grumpy, but at least I don’t bite.”) If he’s out of town, I get ready for morning in a way he doesn’t feel the need to, setting out everything I need for any breakfast plans, leaving notes for any kids who might need instructions before I get up at the last possible minute, and structuring things so that I don’t need to make any decisions. I’m not at my best in the morning, and I know it.

I stole this idea from a friend, a fellow mother of four, who set a breakfast table nightly right down to the bowls of cereal, filled and covered in plastic wrap. The same friend, when all of those children were very young, put them to sleep in their school clothes, a strategy I would totally have emulated if I’d known about it before my kids got attached to their pajamas. Similarly, another friend bought only fleece-lined shoes and slippers for her children when they were in preschool and did away with socks altogether. “I hate socks,” she said. “They’re nothing but trouble.”

Make or help with lunches the night before. Help with the packing of backpacks, then remind regularly about the packing of backpacks. Lay out clothes, especially if one of your children is indecisive in the morning. When my kids were small, I bought four sets of hanging shelves for their closet and put one day’s school clothes on each shelf straight from the laundry basket, underwear and socks and all.

Fill the coffeemaker. Lay out your own clothes. Hang your keys in their spot. Do everything you can for morning you, and do it right after dinner, not last thing before bed.

TURN OFF THE TECH

There are typically two stages of family morning life: the one where the kids naturally get up earlier than most people can function, and the one where it feels impossible to get them up at all. When you’re in the first stage, television and other gadgetry can be a lifesaver. They let you shower, make breakfast, or go back to sleep for a little while (more on that in Chapter 6, “Screens Are Fun, Limiting Them Is Not”).

But once you get past the TV-as-babysitter stage, you quickly enter the TV-as-distraction stage, along with a multitude of other gadgets. For many families with older children, early-morning tech is a shortcut to a tardy slip. “No screens in the morning,” says Jen Mann, a mother of two in Kansas City. “It makes a huge difference. Everyone can focus on what needs to be done and not get distracted so easily. I’m embarrassed to admit how long it took us to realize that was our issue.” If your children are heading straight for phones or screens when they wake up, they’re probably not getting their lunches or homework together, and they might not even be eating that breakfast sitting in front of them. Instituting a no-screens rule will help them get moving—and if you’re checking emails and skimming Facebook yourself, try setting those things aside until you can give them your full focus. You might find you move a little faster, too.

MASTER GOOD TIMING

The other day in the car, I asked my kids, “How long do you think it takes you to brush your teeth and get your coats and things after breakfast?” “Nine minutes.” “I don’t know.” “Fifteen minutes.” “Five minutes. It should take five minutes.”

Nope, I said. Twenty. Twenty, almost without fail, maybe fifteen if there are extenuating circumstances, like a school day everyone is looking forward to. And then I proved it, setting a timer when I first told them to go brush their teeth, and turning it off only when they were all in the car.

If they knew I was timing them, they could go faster, but the real goal of the timer wasn’t speed. It was more practical. I know that to get places on time, I need to count backward from when we’re supposed to be there, and to do that I need to know how long things take. Twenty minutes is fine—if you allot twenty minutes. But humans are notoriously poor estimators of time, and young human beings doubly so. Sometimes it just seems like it ought to be faster. Sometimes we just so badly want it to be faster.

Since magical thinking is as little help here as it is in other areas of parenthood, time yourselves, and don’t fall for the old “that was not a typical morning” routine. There is no typical morning. Someone will always be able to find only one shoe, and someone will always drop her entire binder on the floor, the one with the easy-open rings. Given that, how long does it take your family to get from “brush your teeth and get your backpacks” to completely out the door? Count backward from that, and that’s when the whistle blows. Any later and you’re fooling yourself. You may get lucky once in a while, but it’s the lucky morning that’s not “typical.”

Timing ourselves is itself fun. We can try to break our record, or simply marvel when each and every person in the car had to stop and go back in for, in descending age order, coffee, sneakers, recorder, homework, and jacket, with the result that eleven minutes passed from the moment the first person got in the car to the moment we left the garage—and then another three when someone else turned out to have forgotten her gym shoes.

SET IT TO MUSIC

“We literally have a soundtrack,” says Whit Honea, a father of two in Los Angeles. “It plays from rise to door and all their cues are marked accordingly.” If a full, timed playlist seems like too much, try a song that’s the “get ready to get out the door” cue, whether it comes on automatically (if your household is equipped to make that happen) or whether it’s just something you play manually at the same time every morning. You do you. For some families, a little music makes everything better. I didn’t like the morning playlist when we tried it the first time, but I’m going to give it another shot.

CHANGE SOMETHING BIG

If your mornings are particularly painful because of some external problem—school start times, long commutes, one parent’s daily eight a.m. class overlapping with the other parent’s daily 7:30 staff meeting—it’s worth thinking about changing something big. Friends of ours who were extreme night owls, and who kept their daughters on a schedule that allowed for a lot of evening family time after relatively late work nights, chose their daughters’ elementary school based on the late start time. We don’t have that kind of school choice where I live, but if you do, and if it’s an affordable choice that better suits your life, why not?

Ponn Sabra, a Connecticut mother of three, says she has to laugh when she considers what her family did to make their morning routine easier: they quit. After too many hectic mornings (and with a life that includes a lot of international travel), she chose to homeschool her daughters. Mornings, she says, became “a fun, lively time to enjoy being all together.” That’s an extreme solution to mornings that most of us can only dream about (and many of us, myself included, would consider a nightmare—I can’t imagine a parent less suited to homeschooling her children than I am), but sometimes imagining the extreme can open you up to ideas that, while “out there,” might be achievable, like petitioning the high school to change its start time or moving to a home where your children could walk to school.

If something about your job makes your mornings miserable, like a regularly scheduled staff meeting that requires you to catch a train that leaves before your children are even awake or a commute that’s beginning to feel unsustainable, try to change that one thing, at least part of the time. Ask to move the meeting. Explore working part-time from home. Look ahead, because even a change that makes things better next year can make this year easier. Changing jobs to increase your happiness is the subject of many a book beyond this one. But you do mornings, well, every weekday morning. If your job is making your mornings miserable, that’s a lot of miserable.

If a small change isn’t enough change, think big. Or maybe make mornings a little more fun just by imagining a big change. The school is unlikely to install a gondola ski lift between our second floor and theirs, but we can hope.

GET UP FOR SOMETHING YOU WANT TO DO

After all of that (and I’ve just described more than a decade of evolving mornings), the very weirdest thing we did at our house to improve mornings, the single one thing that meant the children would be on time nearly every day for school and that everyone had time to take a breath and get over whatever morning madness had set in and wake up all the way and head into the day, was the one thing I thought would make us permanently late for everything, forever.

We bought a house with a big barn. And then we put a few horses in that barn, and then we let the apartment above the barn to a wonderful young couple, Kristyn and Greg, and they put even more horses in the barn, and Kristyn and I rescued some horses and put them in a new shed because they didn’t even fit in the barn, and then we added some chickens and then Kristyn and Greg added a baby and then we added some chicks and all of those things had to be taken care of, every morning, by all of us, and so we got up even earlier.

I still don’t like getting up in the morning. It doesn’t matter how much sleep I’ve had, or what kind of alarm I use. I just don’t spring out of bed with a joyful step, and it seems likely that I never will. But when I threw myself headlong into a project I love, helping to run a horse barn, I put myself in a position where, most mornings, I have to get up earlier.

We leave the house at seven-ish for the barn. We leave the barn at 7:40, no -ish, for school, after we do whatever needs to be done. On a really busy morning, we feed the horses (there have been up to nineteen), blanket them, put them out, muck the stalls, put hay in the fields for them, fill the water troughs, feed the chickens, and sweep the aisle. On an easy morning, when the weather is glorious and all the horses slept outside and the fields are conveniently growing grass for them to eat, we bring in a few horses who need grain in the morning, put them back out and clean up after them, then feed the chickens.

Going to the barn is not always a “fun” proposition. There is always one kid who doesn’t want to drag the hose out over the ice and snow to fill the tub in the back field and another who thinks she’s doing more work than anyone else. But even then, when it’s done, everyone has stretched out, everyone has accomplished something, everyone has had some fresh air and done some work that had to be done for some other creature that can’t do it for him- or herself. The work itself may not be fun, but the satisfaction that comes with it is, as is the part where we are always among the earliest cars in the drop-off line.

I’m not suggesting that you run out and buy a farm to make your mornings happier. But maybe making mornings more fun for you means doing something totally unexpected that takes longer, something that isn’t just “get up earlier” but “get up earlier for this.” A weekly diner breakfast. Morning family runs. A stop at an elderly neighbor’s to see if he needs anything, twenty minutes dedicated to getting dinner prepped together, taking time with one child to make a proper breakfast for the rest of the family. I don’t know. I hate getting up in the morning, but I get up earlier for the horse barn, and I’m happier for it.

LET HAPPINESS IN

There is nothing wrong. As I discovered after I tried to outsource my morning madness, when you’re in the middle of that getting-out-of-the-house swirl, you’re probably exactly where you want to be, doing exactly what you want to do—under the circumstances. Second only to the dinner hour, mornings are when families spend the most time all together, all in the same place. You’re all there. You’re all engaged, interacting, moving around one another in that complicated family kitchen dance. This is your time to be the people you are together, and that matters more than the clock or the forgotten algebra assignment. That doesn’t mean you don’t keep making things happen or you aren’t still going to hold the child assigned to empty the dishwasher to her job. It just means there really is something to enjoy in the mornings, although I struggled to find it until I pulled off the whole “get more sleep” thing.

When something big really does happen, a catastrophe, or even just unexpected news, many of us find ourselves longing for the ordinary life we lived before everything suddenly changed. This is it. If we can shift our attitudes just a little, we can find a way to appreciate this time in all its abundance while it’s here, instead of when it’s gone. You can even put a little reminder in a good place, like a note on a mirror or your phone or computer home screen. I have a bracelet inscribed with the words “an ordinary day,” and when I look at it, I take my shoulders out of my ears and soak up the good. Even if it doesn’t feel that great.

Mornings are still the worst. But they’re also part of the best. We get one a day, every day, until they’re gone.