Survey finds getting kids ready for school equals an extra day of work

Mornings can be so rough making sure everyone has what they need for the day and managing to get out the door on time. A recent survey by Indeed found that 60% of new moms say managing a morning routine is a significant challenge, and another new survey reveals just why that is.

The survey, by snack brand Nutri-Grain, suggests that all the various tasks and child herding parents take on when getting the family out the door in the morning adds up to basically an extra workday every week!

Many parents will tell you that it can take a couple of hours to get out of the house each morning person, and as the survey found, most of us need to remind the kids “at least twice in the morning to get dressed, brush their teeth, or put on their shoes.”

According to Nutri-Grain, by the end of the school year, the average parent will have asked their children to hurry up almost 540 times across the weekday mornings.

We totally get it. It’s hard to wait on little ones when we have a very grown-up schedule to get on with, but maybe the world needs to realize that kids just aren’t made to be fast.

As Rachel Macy Stafford, the author of Hands Free Mama, Hands Free Life, writes, having a child who wants to enjoy and marvel at the world while mama is trying to rush through it is hard.

“Whenever my child caused me to deviate from my master schedule, I thought to myself, ‘We don’t have time for this.’ Consequently, the two words I most commonly spoke to my little lover of life were: ‘Hurry up.'” she explains.

We’re always telling our kids to hurry up, but maybe, maybe, we should be telling ourselves—and society—to slow down.

That’s what Stafford did. She took “hurry up” out of her vocabulary and in doing so made that extra workday worth of time into quality time with her daughter, instead of crunch time. She worked on her patience, and let her daughter marvel at the world or slow down when she had to.

“To help us both, I began giving her a little more time to prepare if we had to go somewhere. And sometimes, even then, we were still late. Those were the times I assured myself that I will be late only for a few years, if that, while she is young.”

It’s great advice, but unless we mamas can get the wider world on board, it’s hard to put into practice. When the school bus comes at 7:30 am and you’ve gotta be at the office at 8 am, when the emails start coming before you’re out of bed or your pay gets docked if you punch in five minutes late, it is hard to slow down.

So to those who are making the schedules the rest of us have to live by, to the employers and the school boards and the wider culture, we ask: Can we slow down?

Indeed’s survey suggests that the majority of moms would benefit from a more flexible start time at work and the CDC suggests that starting school later would help students.

Mornings are tough for parents, but they don’t have to be as hard as they are.

[This post was originally published May 17, 2019.]