When "get ready" takes 30 minutes

I'm sure you've had this experience too: you give your child an instruction — get ready to go out — and it takes half an hour to work through five small tasks. Toilet trip. Find the socks. Shoes on. Grab a water bottle, etc.

As a parent, I can end up feeling like the one who nags — having to instruct over and over, at every step. That's exhausting for me. It's probably exhausting for my children too. And it strips away the autonomy most children crave, so we end up in a kind of standoff: my children struggling to get through the task, and me getting more frustrated, or simply more depleted, from having to keep asking.

It can be tempting in these moments to reach for a story about my children being 'lazy', 'defiant' or 'uncooperative', which feeds my frustration. And yet it might simply be that my children struggle to hold the whole list in their head at once. Their working memory may work differently to mine. And what we call executive functioning — the brain's ability to hold a task in mind, break it into steps, and carry those steps through in order — might still be developing.

One thing I have found genuinely helpful was almost embarrassingly simple: a checklist. It started as a Post-it note on the wall — a "getting ready to go" checklist we created together. I could say "it's time to go" and point to the list, and my children could take ownership of working through it themselves.

It doesn't always lead to seamless transitions out the door, and some days they still need me more than others. But it took the mental load off me — I'm no longer repeating the instructions, and it's much simpler to simply help them refer back to the list.

I share this not because I'm an advocate of checklists for all families and children, but because it's an example of how a simple Post-it note helped make our home environment work better for all of us. A simple Post-it note did more to support my children's ability to get ready than further conversation or instruction.

(If your child's needs feel too different for this to apply — stay with me. That's what next week's post is about.)

Where could a simple checklist take the load off you doing the reminding — or help your child follow a sequence of tasks on their own?

And if a checklist would make life harder for your child not easier, are there any other visual prompts that you think might be supportive?

This week, notice when you're reaching for a character judgment – lazy, difficult, defiant – and instead ask: What else could be going on here? What extra support might be missing?

(And if instead you lean into the character judgment and vent a little bit about your child by voice memo to a friend, then that's a very human response, too!)